The Life Death Drives

Cengiz Erdem

Supervisors
Jon Cook and Denise Riley

A thesis in The School of Literature and Creative Writing submitted to The Faculty of
Arts and Humanities in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy at The University of East Anglia.

May 2009

 The Life Death Drives

Publisher: Senselogi, London.
Copyright: Cengiz Erdem, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-4092-9886-1
Standard Copyright License

Acknowledgements
I glorify the following names with praise for teaching, helping, and guiding me in
a perilous time: Jon Cook, Denise Riley, Kate Campbell, Anthony Gash, Howard Caygill,
Andreas Dorschell, Patricia Duncker, Sean Matthews, Sarah Churchwell, Aileen Davies,
Colleen Clayton.
I would also like to thank for different reasons, Claires heart, Braindance,
Mustukillah Sound Squad, Dread Entertainment Agency, Genetica, The Wall of Sound,
CzechTek and all Soma Recordings personnel.
That said, though, an essential party would have been left unthanked and
unpraised, unless The University of East Anglias International Office was glorified too,
for funding this project.
On the whole in the absence of all these people, institutions, festivities, organs,
collective bodies, and establishments, I would have never been able to finish this work.
At times of despair their presence gave me the strength to go on; even when there was
nowhere to go on. They acted out for me, in and through their presence, how one
becomes what one is. For me this signified nothing but the necessity of patience. It was
only through patient labour that, to put it in a phrase Zizek used for Badiou, one could
shake the foundations of ones own mode of being.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements......3
Table of Contents.....................4
Abstract........7
Introduction: The Contact Between Deconstruction and Affirmative Recreation
1. Overview.. ...8
2. Objective....14
3. Method...........17
4. The Contact.........24
5. Structural Summary of The Thesis............26
PART ONE: Twilight Psychedelia
Chapter I: Life and Death in a Raving New World....................33
1. Freud and Einstein.........33
2. The Void, Drives, Automata......37
3. The Subject and Power......41
4. The Imprisoned Creators of Our Times.....43
5. The Nietzschean Subject....49
Intermediation 1...53
Chapter II: The Controversy...54
1. Nature, Culture, and Lacan....55
2. No Replica?....................................61
3. The Significance of Kleins Fantasies...63
4. Klein, Lacan, and Psychosis..........66
5. Klein, Derrida, Deconstruction......73
4

Conclusion of Part I.....78

PART TWO: Crafty Cuts
Chapter III: Cinema and Psychoanalysis ..84
1. Cinematic Apparatus and The Psyche.......84
2. Dream, Fantasy, and Film......89
3. Projective Identification and Introjection .....95
4. Cinema and Fetishism99
5. Butterfly Effect................104
6. The Island.....108
Intermediation 2.........111
Chapter IV: Cronenberg, Burroughs, Deleuze..............112
1. Passing Across The Dead Zone and Moving Towards The Dread Zone.112
2. Narcissus Revisited..............117
3. The Mantle Twins........119
4. Consequences of Messing With Nature...........125
5. Naked Lunch and The Body Without Organs..131
6. The Evil Spirit and The Spiritual Automaton......140
7. From Metaphor an Towards Metamorphosis...145
Conclusion of Part II.....152
PART THREE: Post-traumatic Writing Disorder
Chapter V: Creativity and The Unconscious....154
1. Surreal Faces of The Unconscious...155
2. A Pineal Eye Soliloquy........162
3. Is Pineal Eye an Organ Without a Body?....166
5

4. Artaud, Deleuze, and the Will to Nothingness....170

5. Artaud and The Shaman...180
6. Beckett.181
7. Krapps Last Tape....189
Intermediation 3.....194
Chapter VI: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma.........195
1. Architecture of The White Hotel......195
2. Is Everyman an Island?....205
3. Projection-Introjection Mechanism in Jack Kerouacs The Subterraneans..... ..210
Conclusion of Part III....219
Consequences Beyond The Life Death Drives........ 221
1. The Immortal Subject Beyond The Life Drive........221
2. The Immortal Subject Beyond The Death Drive.........227
3. Expulsion of the Negative and Affirmation of Life are Mutually Exclusive..233
4. Contaction is not the same as imposing one order upon another..236
5. Epictetus? Yes..............................................................................................................237
6. To What End Last Words? To what end suffering......240
AFTERWORD...243
1. The Unhappy Consciousness.......................................................................................243
2. Conversation Around Nietzsche..................................................................................254
Filmograpy & Bibliography...........281

ABSTRACT
Throughout the thesis I propose that the life drive and the death drive, each
divided within itself, constitute the two sides of a single projection-introjection
mechanism. For the emergence of a new truth from within this projection-introjection
mechanism in which the contemporary subject finds itself caught, a critical apparatus
taking its driving force from death within life is required. The affirmative recreation of
the concepts of the life drive and the death drive aims at turning these concepts from
forms of knowledge to modes of being and thinking. As modes of being and thinking
life/death drives emerge as the two components of a dynamic and mobile critical
apparatus born of and giving birth to a fragile contact between immanence and
transcendence, as well as between affirmation and negation. This critical apparatus is
dynamic and mobile; it is capable of changing its shape according to the requirements of
the situation presented by the cultural product. It exposes the operation of the life drive
and the death drive within the cultural product and then shows how the life drive and the
death drive are produced, exploited, and/or oppressed as the two sides of a disjunctive
synthesis. I invert and put this disjunctive synthesis into the spotlight as the cause and the
effect of a contact which splits life/death drives, or affirmative recreation and
deconstruction, as it unites them in the way of a practical theory of cont(r)action for a
theoretical practice.
The thesis proposes that the life drive and the death drive are rooted in
transcendence, whereas immanent critique requires conscious desiring to produce new
modes of being and thinking as yet not conceivable from within the dominant model of
projection-introjection mechanism based on identification.

INTRODUCTION

The Contact Between Deconstruction and Affirmative Recreation

1. Overview
The fragile title of the introduction, which splits as it unites deconstruction and
affirmative recreation, should not discourage the reader from even beginning to engage in
an encounter with this thesis. This thesis is the product of an intense meditation on the
relevance of Freuds concepts of the life drive and the death drive for contemporary
cultural and critical theory in the light of Melanie Kleins projection-introjection
mechanism. I consider Benthams Panopticon to be the material form taken by the life
and death drives as well as by the concepts of projection and introjection, since
Foucaults interpretation of it in his Discipline and Punish as the model of modern
Western societies started to manifest its effects.
I propose that these concepts, both the Freudian (life drive and death drive) and
the Kleinian (introjection and projective identification), are becoming more and more
relevant with the recent developments in technology. As an inorganic realm, the realm of
technology forms a transparent sheet that blurs the line between life and death, the
organic and the inorganic. But rather than develop a paranoid and reactive attitude
towards technology, which would be a ridiculous thing to do at this stage of its
development, I attempt to find a way of affirming life attached to technology in the face
of the truth that affirmation of life requires affirming death within it.
There is no reason to interpret this attitude as a stance against technological
development. On the contrary, my problem is not only with the content of the
developmental process; technology remains a transitional object for me. My concern is
8

also the form of the developmental process, the ways in which the failures of this
developmental process manifest themselves, and where this developmental process is
heading as seen in particular works of literature and cinema.
This thesis does not project an apocalyptic vision of existence. My will is highly
optimistic, it is my intellect that is pessimistic.
One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the
willing that has received its direction from the ascetic ideal
actually expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of
the animal, still more of the material, this abhorrence of the
senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and of beauty,
this longing away from all appearance, change, becoming,
death, wish, longing itselfall of this meanslet us grasp
thisa will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion
against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it
is and remains a will! And, to say again at the end what I
said at the beginning: man would much rather will
nothingness than not will 1
During the course of my investigation first I distinguish two distinct forms of the
will to nothingness. The first one is the death drive and the second one is the life drive.
As we will see, I used Freuds drive theory to split Nietzsches will to nothingness, or
what might be called nihilism, into two separate but contiguous forms. These two forms
of nihilism, that I distinguish using Freud and Nietzsche under the guiding hand of
Melanie Klein, are perpetually in conflict with one another. At times they put on one
1

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, transl. Maudemarie Clark and Alan
J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 118
9

anothers masks and costumes; they act out one anothers roles, and they keep the show
business going on.
Perhaps what was at stake was the confrontation between Eros and Thanatos, the
yet to be discovered life drive and death drive within him, when Nietzsche proclaimed
himself Christ and Dionysus at the same time in one last cry. In this light I see the life
drive and the death drive as the two constituent parts of the will to nothingness, two
driving forces behind the will to nothingness, which give birth to the two different forms
of contemporary nihilism: Civilized progress and barbaric regress.
But that I dont find the resolution of the conflict between them satisfying does
not mean that I am dreaming of a higher form of reconciliation. What I mean is that these
two are always already reconciled, and yet that the only way to actualise this
reconciliation is to think their separation through introducing a difference between them
that unites them as it splits them.
I see the failure of the relationship between civilised progress and barbaric regress
as something becoming increasingly relevant for an analysis of cultural and natural
transformations of life. The ongoing conflict between what we started to understand from
civilized progress and barbaric regress after Hegel and since his three different
applications to the study of culture, embodied by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, does not
seem to have been a sufficiently fruitful one.
As Foucault put it in his essay Nietzsche, Marx, Freud with these three thinkers a
new form of interpretation emerged in three different practices. Following Nietzsche,
Foucault asserts that the dominant discourse of the classical period is the history of an
error. According to Nietzsche this is a history written by the ones who hold the power
but who are at the same time the weak. Nietzsche says that these have a slave mentality
10

and this mentality subjects them to being reactive forces that multiply themselves by
contaminating the others who are treated as inferior but are in fact the strong. In pursuit
of escaping from that history of an error written by the slaves and which is a product of
slave mentality, Foucault attempted to practice a new way of reading history which he,
borrowing the term from Nietzsche, calls genealogy. In Foucaults words from another
essay in the same compilation,
Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and
profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the
molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it
rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations
and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for
origins.2
Where the soul pretends unification or the Me fabricates a
coherent identity, the genealogist sets out to study the
beginningnumberless beginnings, whose faint traces and
hints of colour are readily seen by a historical eye.3
Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are they who set the task and determined the
objective. This task is to learn from the past and sustain the conditions of impossibility
for suffering to repeat itself. In other words, the task is to supply the subject with
practical tools for living a long, healthy, and happy life. But the health of the subject is
not separable from the improvement of the others conditions of existence. Horkheimer
and Adorno, and Marcuse followed this line of thought.

Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, from Essential Works vol.2: Ethics,
ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin, 1998), 370
3
Foucault, 374
11

Writing for different reasons, in a different way, and in a different context, the
solutions of the past are my problems. My aim is to show that what seems to be a
liberating attitude turns into its opposite and becomes a restrictive and paralysing
theoretical approach. In other words, the symptom which is the non-reason inherent in
reason turns into the cure when in fact it is the manifestation of the illness. This dynamic
of a vicious cycle will be the major object of this study.
To stay alive in a state of conflict what one needs to learn to do is to write and
rewrite a law for oneself as one goes along the way; a law that is permanently in touch
with the others within and without. One is to become capable of imagining another world
and still live in this world in such a way as to turn life into a movement towards a new
life. Death as Law is interior to the subject as much as it is exterior to it.
The Satyr, at his first sight of fire, wished to kiss and embrace it,
but Prometheus said, You, goat, will mourn your vanished beard,
for fire burns him who touches it, yet it furnishes light and heat,
and is an instrument of every craft for those who have learned to
use it.4
At the root of every progressive movement Nietzsche sees a traumatic incident,
and for that reason the real is always touched through a surface event. Nietzsche sees
progress as an effect of regress and regress as an effect of progress. Nietzsche confuses
causes and effects. For Nietzsche the event that manifests the change of roles between
cause and effect always takes the form of a conflict between the causes and effects of
regress and progress on/of one another. This unrepresentable and unnamable event,
which, for Nietzsche, goes beyond the gap between the psychic and the somatic, is itself
4

Plutarch, Moralia Vol.2, transl. F.C. Babbitt (Harvard University Press; Cambridge,
1971), 8-9
12

the cause of a traumatic effect the transcendence of which is at the same time a process of
passing through the state of being governed by a superior and yet unknown force, death,
which is interior and exterior to the life of the subject at the same time. For me this
process involves passing through the walls of ones wound rather than being caught up in
an endless process of climbing over it and falling back in again.
Slavoj Zizek points out that Lacan calls this process of passing through
traversing the fantasy.5 Deleuze would have said, it is, at the same time, traversing the
symbolic, in that it is a passage across the field of affective intensities and partial objects
where there remains no gap between fantasy and reality, psychic and somatic, part and
whole, organ and body, self and world, transcendental and empirical. Traversing the
fantasy is the process of becoming in and through which Nietzsche feels himself to be
all the names in history. Where transcendence and immanence become one, there one
experiences a sublimation of sublimation, and learns to affirm life as it is by affirming the
negative contact, and lives on as pure immanence surviving psychic death.
All this, of course, requires a realization that the external forces, having become
interior to the subject, themselves create the conditions of negative contact, and yet the
affirmation of the negating subject is itself constitutive of the affirmative contact.
Nietzsche had failed in surviving this process of realization. The confrontation
with the unconscious, the Real forces of the outside, had become so intense that a
spiralling of his thoughts into nothingness became inescapable. His painstaking process
of writing against himself caused a turning against itself of his desire to immerse himself
in the chaos of the Real. When this condition of impoverishment and exhaustion
coincided with his will to write he found the strength to say what he may: And, to say

Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), 51

13

again at the end what I said at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness
than not will6
2. Objective
The principal objective of this thesis is to point out the continuing, and even
increasing relevance of the concepts of life drive and death drive for contemporary
cultural and critical theory. When Freud created the concepts of life drive and death drive
he was influenced not only by Nietzsche, but also by Darwins theory of evolution and
the neuroscience of his day. In the light of the recent developments in neuroscience
Freuds drive theory may appear to have lost its relevance, and yet this does not mean
that it cannot be affirmatively recreated and put to use in the critique of contemporary
cultural products and the psychoanalysis of the world in general. The use of these
concepts should not mean that I am reducing being human to a dualistic vision of life, for
I am not ignoring the existence of other drives such as the drive to play, but trying to
show that many cultural products still operate at the level of a Freudo/Cartesian dualism,
and are based on the production, exploitation and/or oppression of the life drive and the
death drive.
I situate the concepts of the life drive and the death drive in the context of
philosophy and rethink these concepts through their relation to immanence and
transcendence, affirmation and negation. It would, however, be too simplistic to equate
the life drive with transcendence and the death drive with immanence. That, precisely, is
not the case in this thesis. To my mind the life drive unifies the multiple by transcending
death and the death drive splits the given unities by transcending life. So life/death drives
are both transcendence and negation oriented, whereas immanence and affirmation
6

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, transl. Maudemarie Clark and Alan
J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 118
14

signify and are signified by life/death without unconscious drives, but conscious desiring.
This form of being in relation to the concepts of life drive and death drive enables me to
see these drives not as unchanging constituents of human nature and life, or as solidly
defined concepts constitutive of a certain kind of knowledge about human nature and life
but as modes of being and forms of thinking produced and projected onto human nature
by cultural products. In the light of this, I propose that these concepts can be used as
components of a mobile and dynamic critical apparatus targeting the works in and
through which the myths of life drive and death drive are not only produced, but also
exploited and/or oppressed.
I attempt to show how the life drive is exploited as the death drive is oppressed in
some literary and filmic texts, while the death drive is exploited and the life drive is
oppressed in some others. The condition of possibility for the oppression/exploitation of
the life/death drives to take place is sustained by a manipulation of the ambiguous
relationship between these two; they can easily reverse the roles and disguised as their
opposites, the life drive and the death drive become enemies working in the service of
destroying the subject whose life, with the advance of global capitalism and the
increasing abuse of the recent developments in technology, has literally become an
oscillation between them. For instance, the subject takes on the characteristics of Eros as
his persona, becomes a virtual Eros in a chat-room on the internet, but has to act like a
Thanatos at work, and becomes someone who pretends to be a Thanatos in ordinary
social reality, when in fact he prefers to be a descendant of Eros, or inversely.
My aim in this study is to look for traces and investigate the implications of this
paradoxical situation in particular works of philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural and
critical theory, literature, and cinema produced during the twentieth century. At present
15

this situation in which the subject finds himself/herself has become not only imposed on
the subject but also willed by the subject.
As I already said, while in some cases the death drive becomes the target of
exploitation/oppression, in some other cases the life drive becomes this target. I use texts
from, cinema, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in order to explicate this theory
of the emergence of the new forms that power, embodied by and embodying the Big
Other, takes.
Unless one splits the past and the present, the self and the other, the theory and the
practice, the life drive and the death drive, the subject of enunciation(conscious desire)
and the enunciated content(the unconscious drive), the critical and the clinical, it becomes
impossible to create a space out of which a new and practical truth emerges, and hence
the conditions of existence cannot be developed. All these binaries are separate but
contiguous to one another, they are always already reconciled but the only way to
actualize this reconciliation is to introduce a split between them which unites them as it
exposes the gap inherent in their relationship. We are in the process of realizing this
precisely because we have started to see that if theory is not practical it serves nothing.
This realization should bring with it a will to split theory and practice, for their unity
means the destruction of both of them; already before the beginning of the process of
becoming one they start destroying one another. Their oneness is their death, for one dies
as much, more than one lives as such. For me theory aims at developing practical ways of
practicing freedom, and its goal is to sustain the conditions for the possibility of its own
destruction. On this both Adorno and Foucault agree.
In the light of the result of my investigation I propose that a practical theory of
progress based on an interaction between deconstruction and affirmative recreation is not
16

only possible but is also already at work within the contemporary psychosomatic and
sociopolitical realms of experience.
3. Method
The nature of this study requires an interdisciplinary and a multi-methodological
attitude which goes beyond the opposition between merely conceptual and merely
empirical approaches. It is based on a mode of enquiry which takes its driving force from
thought-experiments that open paths to a new field in which various perspectives interact
and form an intra-subjective dimension of theoretical practice situating psychoanalysis,
cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy in the context of cultural and critical theory. For
the emergence of a new truth out of the old knowledge one must pose new questions
concerning the workings of the human mind. In the light of the recent developments in
cognitive neuroscience, for instance, especially the works of Antonio Damasio and
Gerald Edelman, Freuds concepts of the life drive and the death drive, Kleins concepts
of introjection and projective identification, and Wilfred Bions affirmative recreation of
Kleins theories in the way of a theory of thinking become extremely relevant for the
development of a universal cultural and critical theory.
Cognitive neuroscience proposes that the quality of an external object is always
already projected onto that object by the neuronal activity of the brain. What cognitive
neuroscience lacks is a historical context, likewise what cultural studies lacks is an
organic basis. An interaction between psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, cultural
studies, and cognitive neuroscience can break out of the closure of the humanities and
give birth to the link which has come to be considered missing, between nature and
nurture, organic and inorganic, empirical and conceptual, epistemological and
ontological, transcendental and immanent, the objective and the subjective.
17

Because of the dynamic and parallel nature of re-entry and

because it is a process of higher-order selection, it is not
easy to provide a metaphor that captures all the properties
of re-entry. Try this: Imagine a peculiar (and even weird)
string quartet, in which each player responds by
improvisation to ideas and cues of his or her own, as well
as to all kinds of sensory cues in the environment. Since
there is no score, each player would provide his or her own
characteristic tunes, but initially these various tunes would
not be coordinated with those of the other players. Now
imagine that the bodies of the players are connected to each
other by myriad fine threads so that their actions and
movements are rapidly conveyed back and forth through
signals of changing thread tensions that act simultaneously
to time each players actions. Signals that instantaneously
connect the four players would lead to a correlation of their
sounds; thus, new, more cohesive, and more integrated
sounds would emerge out of the otherwise independent
efforts of each player. This correlative process would alter
the next action of each player, and by these means the
process would be repeated but with new emergent tunes
that were even more correlated. Although no conductor
would instruct or coordinate the group and each player
would still maintain his or her style and role, the players
overall productions would lead to a kind of mutually
coherent music that each one acting alone would not
produce.7
The model of mind conceptualized by Gerald Edelman shows us that the mind is
an embodied substance which has the ability to adapt to changes surrounding it. If we
keep in mind that cinema, literature, art, and music show how the mind works at a
7

Gerald Edelman, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic
Books, 2000), 49

18

particular moment in history, as well as the emotional state of that particular moment, it
becomes clear why a mode of enquiry rather than a specific method is required for the
analysis and critique of human consciousness and its relation to the environment
surrounding it. In this context, the plot driven critique of the literary and filmic texts aims
at distinguishing between the world of consciousness and the world of appearances. My
claim is that it is only through looking at the mortal world of appearances with the eyes
of an immortal consciousness that we can see that which is present as an absence in the
predominant symbolic order. By looking at what happens when in a movie or a book as
well as how that thing happens, I sustain the conditions of impossibility as the
conditions of possibility for cont(r)action to take place and give birth to an immortal
subject. Needless to say, this subject is also an object encountering and encountered by
the unknown within the known, the chaos inherent in the order itself, that calls forth he
who has died so many times and is yet to die again and be reborn many more times so as
to live as dead again. The reader might be disappointed because I will not have pursued
and incorporated Edelmans neural Darwinism and further developed the idea of a
context-bound cognitive neuroscience and a matter(brain) based cultural and critical
theory. The reason for this is that I discovered Edelmans work towards the end of writing
my thesis, and then rewrote the Introduction. As a matter of fact, after this discovery the
whole thesis itself could have been rewritten. Just as the Law changes its object and is in
turn changed by that object, my critical apparatus, too, changes and is changed by its
objects, in this case cultural products, be they filmic, literary or philosophical texts. It is
such that this theoretical narrative moves on in such a way as to cut itself from its own
past and unite with its own future at the same time, that is, in one simultaneous
movement in two directions at once.
19

Hence it becomes clear why I pay attention to what happens when and how
that thing happens, at the same time. For this I am indebted to Edelman who shifted the
perspective of cognitive neuroscience from how the brain makes sense, to when the
brain makes sense. If one reads the writings on film and literature in this thesis with the
conscious naivety of their plot based critique in mind, one can sense the underlying
current of humour and the erratic undertone of irony, both of which knock down the
serious tone of the critique based on a linear reproduction of a circular plot as we see in
the investigation of David Lynchs Mulholland Drive for instance.
In his Critique of Judgement, Kant distinguishes between the determinative and
the reflective modes of judgement.
If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given,
the judgement that subsumes the particular under it... is
determinative. If, however, only the particular for which the
universal is to be found is given, judgement is merely
reflective.8
If we keep in mind that the reflective mode of judgement reflects on particulars in
such a way as to produce universals to which they can be subjected, and that the
determinative mode of judgement determines a particular by subjecting it to a universal,
it becomes understandable why among these two I shall be using the reflective mode
which splits as it unites the subject of enunciation and the enunciated subject. But it must
be kept in mind that the subject of enunciation which refers to the universal is itself a
constitutive illusion, or a regulatory idea necessary for the emergence of the immortal
subject as the enunciated content. It is only in and through a position of non-mortality
8

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (London: Wilder
Publications, 2008), 13
20

within and without mortal life at the same time that the exploitation of mortality can be
brought into the spotlight. A critique of the exploitation of mortality inherent in
particularly exemplary cultural products will be achieved through putting them in a
perspective that analyzes the life death drives in such a way as to expose the exploitation
of the fear of death as the driving force inherent in them. The point is that it is indeed
necessary to fantasize being what one is not, in our case being non-mortal, to be able to
become self-conscious of ones self-reflexivity in the way of creating an order of
signification not caught up in the rotary motion of drives locked in Kleins projectionintrojection mechanism, but rather one which breaks this vicious cycle and at least
attempts to subtract death from life in a counter-act to the post-structuralist idea of life as
a process of dying and death as an absent presence in the midst of life. It is only through
such a subtraction of the absent presence of death within life that the productive
interaction between Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, Foucaults bio-politics,
Badious theory of infinity, and Kants reflective mode of judgement give birth to the
immortal subject as the womb of a new thought, a new life, and a new mode of being,
free of the exploitation of mortality and engagingly indifferent to this mortal, all too
mortal life.
Let us imagine a subject who finds himself in a certain situation which appears to
have no escape route; a situation which nails him to a painful existence and brings him
closer to extinction with every move he makes. What he needs is Bions theory of
creative process and the emergence of new thought from within the dominant projectionintrojection mechanism. In his Theory of Thinking Bion says that dismantling is as
important in creative process as integration, that is, introjection and splitting are as
necessary as projective identification and unification. Bion pays special attention to the
21

process of introjection and projective identification and recreates Kleins paranoidschizoid position as a way of showing that it has two forms; one is healthy and the other
is pathological. For Klein it was only with the attainment of the depressive position that
the formless experience was given a form, the thoughts were invested with symbolic
meanings. Bion sees introjection and projective identification as the two separate but
contiguous halves and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as the
complementary parts of one another in the creative process. Now, if, following Bion, we
think about Kleins introjection and projective identification in the context of Derridas
technique of deconstructive reading, we see that deconstruction is a mobile and dynamic
mode of critique which moves between fragmentation and integration of the meaning of a
text. Although deconstruction, as practised by Derrida himself, adapts itself to the internal
dynamics of the text as the object of critique, it still lacks the affirmative and immanent
fluidity which is necessary to open up holes, or passages, through which a new truth in
touch with the requirements of the present situation can slip. This is because Derridas
practice of deconstruction is still a negating activity and a transcendence oriented
practice, which remains within the confines of the antagonistic relationship between the
life drive and the death drive. To become affirmative, deconstructive practice needs to
produce and incorporate its own difference from itself, that is, it has to become immanent
to itself and the text it interprets.
As a mode of thinking, deconstruction attempts to erase the gap between the life
drive and the death drive, but always fails, and this failure eternally confines
deconstructive practice to the domain of antagonism between the life drive and the death
drive. And if we keep in mind that deconstruction as a mode of thinking has become the

22

dominant way of being creative we can understand why a critique of deconstruction is a

critique of contemporary culture.
In this thesis I try to expose the workings of the deconstructive practice in certain
works of art, literature, and cinema, which, consciously or unconsciously, exploit the
ambiguity of the relationship between the life drive and the death drive, hence oppressing
the one or the other. Needless to say this oppression of the one or the other necessarily
exploits the one or the other, for oppression of the one requires exploitation of the other.
As a consequence of this dynamic inherent in contemporary nihilistic culture projected
onto the subject, the reader/spectator is removed out into the transcendental world of
unconscious drives, leading to an illusory sense of omniscience on behalf of the
reader/spectator.
The difference between deconstruction and affirmative recreation is that in the
former an interaction between the destruction of a structure based on metaphysics of
presence and creation of an opening, production of a void within the meaning of the text
based on logocentrism is at work, whereas what is at work in the latter is a simultaneous
dismantling of meaning, opening up of a void in the context of the text, and sustenance of
the conditions for the possibility of the meanings flow in and through this void and out
into the outside of the dominant context.9 Derridas well known proposition that there is
nothing outside the text is not the basic assumption of affirmative recreation; quite the
contrary, a hole is opened within the context, and the meaning of the text flows through
this hole. The meaning of the text is made to move on progressively, not just left without
9

It is important to note that here context signifies the dominant projection-introjection

mechanism. To go outside this projection-introjection mechanism requires what Bion
calls the binocular vision. Binocular vision means that the subject is still within the
dominant context and yet he is also in touch with another mode of being which he is able
to project onto the present and future. Binocular vision is the first step towards creating a
new situation out of the present situation. Wilfred Bion, A Theory of Thinking, Second
Thoughts, (London: Karnac Books, 1984).
23

any foundations on which to stand and consequently fall. Deconstruction is concerned

with exposing the rigidity and the solidity of rigid structures and solid constructions as is
clear from its name. In a nutshell this is what Derridas self-reflexive reading strategy
called deconstruction does: the socially and historically constructed and generally
accepted dominant meaning of the text is explicated. And then this meaning is shown to
be self-contradictory through the opening of a gap between what the author intended to
say and what he has actually said. In affirmative recreation whats at stake is a melting of
the meaning and its continuous reshaping like a sculpture. The text is turned from a solid
state into something like lava or clay and kept hot for further and perpetual reshaping, not
into another completed sculpture. For me sculptures are products of an attempt to freeze
life and/but a frozen life is no different from death.
4. The Contact
The word cont(r)act in the title of the introduction means two things at the same
time. The first one is counter-act and the second one is implosion. When these two
meanings intersect we get a contact without a contract. In this new form of contact the
parties involved agree on the necessity of the absence of a contractual relationship in their
contact. For the two meanings of the cont(r)act, counter-act and implosion, to function
interactively in the way of sustaining the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a
contact without a contract between the self and the other, an affirmative attitude is
required. When and if the cont(r)act becomes affirmative, the counter-act and the
implosion of the pre-dominant projection-introjection mechanism, which we can also
refer to as the pre-dominant context based on negation and transcendence, intervenes in
the situation and interrupts the order of things. Cont(r)action opens a hole in the internal

24

structure of the projection-introjection mechanism and initiates change in the way of

opening up new paths towards new modes of being, thinking, and creation.
It is important to note here that every projection-introjection mechanism belongs
to the world of unconscious drives. Opening a hole in the world of unconscious drives
makes the good objects and the bad objects spiral into the void and the subject escapes
oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position, or
between the life and death drives. This also means that the subjects world turns from
being governed by the metaphysical mode of production based on unconscious drives and
into the social mode of production based on conscious desiring.
The concept of cont(r)act is the product of an interaction between deconstruction
and affirmative recreation. The cont(r)act produces an outside within the pre-dominant
projection-introjection mechanism, or context. Cont(r)action connects the counter forces
of the inside with the unnameable forces of the outside. The inward explosion creates a
turbulence within the projection-introjection mechanism causing the good objects and the
bad objects to spiral into the outside within created by the counter forces of the inside and
into the void constituted by the unnameable forces of the outside. We must remember that
good and bad are concepts that belong not to the material world but to the metaphysical
world, not to life but to the beyond of life. As we know, psychotics see everything in
terms of a struggle between the forces of good and evil. If we apply this psychotic vision
to the polarity of the life drive and the death drive we can understand what I actually
want to mean when I make a distinction between the world of unconscious drives and the
world of conscious desiring. But by doing this am I not, in a psychotic fashion, dividing
the world into two; the bad world of unconscious drives and the good world of conscious
desiring? Am I not, in a way, trying to transcend the state of being governed by the
25

unconscious drives? I am indeed, for I still am within the psychotic world of metaphysics
trying to create an outside, or an opening to loving without interpretation and
identification. To achieve this I have to act self-reflexively, which I think is what I do
when say it is necessary to pass from the state of being governed by unconscious drives
to the mode of being productive of conscious desiring. This self-reflexivity and these
paradoxical statements are the forms this passage takes and they lie at the decentred heart
of my epoch.
To sum it up and to clarify it all I shall now say what I merely hinted at right at
the beginning. The theory of cont(r)act employs deconstruction and affirmative recreation
with the aim of sustaining the conditions of possibility for a fragile and yet affirmative
contact not based on a contract between the self and the other, between the old and the
new, between illness and health, between the clinical and the critical, and even between
life and death. The counteract and the implosion are the complementary positions of
cont(r)action, that is, of the theoretical practice demonstrating an interaction between
deconstruction and affirmative recreation.
5. Structural Summary of The Thesis
The thesis is composed of three parts divided into six chapters, each of which is
divided within itself into several subsections, followed by the consequences and an
afterword. The three major parts concentrate on three different discursive forms
(theoretical, filmic, literary) and each part stands for one of the three different positions in
the course of the developmental process of a practical theory of cont(r)action composed
of two complementary actions counter to one another which are deconstruction and
affirmative recreation. These three positions in the developmental process of a practical
theory of cont(r)action, which is constituted by and is constitutive of a theoretical practice
26

demonstrating the interaction between deconstruction and affirmative recreation, are

worked through application to contemporary theoretical(part I), filmic(part II), and
literary(part III) texts.
The enunciated content of the thesis is not one, but three. If one of these is
missing, however, the other two cannot persist. For the enunciated content to stand firm
and manifest itself they have to remain separate from but contiguous to one another at all
times.
In each chapter the relationships between progress and regress, creativity and
destruction, projection and introjection, identification and alienation, the life drive and
the death drive, as well as theory and practice, are analyzed in various ways and using
varying means. There is not one way of looking at things here, but three; for each part
requires its own way of being looked at.
The theoretical, literary, and filmic texts studied can be considered partial-objects
interacting with one another where a fragile contact between illness and health,
psychoanalysis, philosophy, post-structuralism, and critical theory, and even East and
West, North and South, West and North, the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic takes
place. These theoretical, literary, and filmic texts are transitional objects in the service of
explicating the relevance of Kleinian concepts of projective identification and
introjection, and Freudian concepts of the life drive and the death drive, for contemporary
cultural and critical theory.
The first chapter opens with the summary of the encounter between Freud and
Einstein upon a call from the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in 1932.
This first chapter aims at defining and analyzing the formation of certain concepts, such
as the life drive and the death drive, introjection and projective identification, which will
27

play dominant roles throughout the thesis. In this chapter I also compare the projects and
critical strategies of post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School drawing on sources from
Adorno and Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. The
first chapter attempts to lay the foundations of a healthy conflict between philosophy and
psychoanalysis, as well as psychotherapy, or clinical theory and critical theory. It also sets
the grounds for the analysis of the relationship between creativity, automatism, and the
Real in the following chapters.
In the second chapter I intend to show the relevance of Lacans theory of subject
formation to the thesis and link it to Kleins pre-verbal - if not pre-linguistic - stage of
development. Lacans critique of Klein for being too biological is reconsidered through a
look at their altering theorizations of the emergence of schizophrenia which can be
translated from Greek as split-soul, or, broken-heart.
The third chapter investigates the cinematic apparatus and how it is able to
directly communicate with the unconscious and shape it. I tend to believe that in its
present state cinema is a machinery that populates the spectator with bad objects, and
following Christian Metz, I argue that it is not by saying that cinema is the good object
that cinema will get better, on the contrary, my critique of the cinematic apparatus targets
its use as a tool for manipulating the unconscious; my critique of cinema is aimed at
criticizing a particular use of cinema which gives birth to a larval fascism by constantly
provoking projective identification.
The fourth chapter concentrates on David Cronenbergs films including The Dead
Zone, Dead Ringers, Videodrome,

eXistenZ, The Naked Lunch, and is aimed at

explicating Deleuzes version of the relationship between creativity and destructivity. In

Cronenbergs movies we usually have an artist, a writer, or a scientist who undertakes a
28

creative task and/but whose project turns against itself in the process through the
domination of his psyche with the non-symbolizable aggressive impulses. Cronenberg
portrays creative people who in time turn into agents of destruction through science and
art. And Deleuze has often mentioned the possibility of an interruption of the creative
process by the entry of a traumatic kernel which should remain non-symbolized and
unconscious if one were to be able to go on creating consciously without becoming selfdestructive.
The fifth chapter looks at the Surrealist movement and how Breton tried to use the
unconscious in a productive way and failed in doing so. To show the shortcomings of
Surrealism I use Batailles comparison of Nietzsche and the surrealists and his criticism
of Dalis Lugubrious Game. This is followed by a brief comparison of Artaudian theatre
of cruelty and Shamanism. We will have seen that Surrealists and Artaud laid the
foundations of two differently conceived techniques of manipulating the unconscious
drives and exploiting the ambiguity of the relationship between the life drive and the
death drive. The next section of the fifth chapter is on Beckett and analyzes Becketts
generic thought as pointed out by Alain Badiou in his book On Beckett. I try to show how
Beckett not only represents the human-condition through subtraction of the Symbolic
from the Real, but also to portray a Beckett explicating the dynamics of the unconscious
as a hole in the subject in his plays such as Waiting for Godot, Krapps Last Tape, and
Endgame.
The sixth chapter investigates the relationship between literature, psychoanalysis,
violence and trauma. My intention in this chapter is to investigate the ethical and the
political implications of trying to represent the traumatic kernel which resists
symbolization. I especially concentrate on D.M. Thomass The White Hotel which is a
29

post-structuralist novel about the Holocaust and a problematization of the truth of

psychoanalysis. Working through The White Hotel I attempt to put under a critical and
clinical magnifying glass the foundations of the contemporary understanding of healthy
living. In this chapter I also analyze the interaction between the life drive and the death
drive in William Goldings The Lord of the Flies and the workings of projective
identification and introjection in Jack Kerouacs The Subterraneans. This last chapter
prepares the grounds on which I can finally show, via Slavoj Zizek and Friedrich
Nietzsche, how illness is presented as health in todays transglobal capitalism, how the
roles of affirmation and negation, immanence and transcendence, the life drive and the
death drive are reversed, turning them into their opposites.
Following the consequences, which uses Alain Badious theory of infinity and the
immortal subject to break the vicious cycle of the life and death drives in the way of
opening the realm of love beyond the rotary motion of drives and the law of capital, the
thesis ends with an Afterword entitled and composed of A Conversation Around
Nietzsche Between a Stoic and a Sceptic. Before the conversation, however, there is a
note on the context of this conversation and its connection to Kleins projectionintrojection mechanism as well as Hegels unhappy consciousness. In other words, the
first section of the afterword links the conversation to the theories of the subject in the
works of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Klein. Entitled The Unhappy Consciousness,
or, the Stoics and Sceptics Locked in Kleins Projection-Introjection Mechanism, it is a
theoretical explication of the relationship between Hegels concept of the unhappy
consciousness and Kleins paranoid-schizoid position and manic-depressive position. It is
essential to the nature of this study that it ends with a division between a Stoic and a
Sceptic embodied by Nietzsche. This division is, at the same time, the one between Eros
30

and Thanatos, or Oedipus and Narcissus; and Nietzsche conceived this division within
himself in the form of a division between Christ and Dionysus. But what about the Stoic
and the Sceptic, where do they enter the scene?
Today Stoicism is considered a therapeutic philosophy of life and Scepticism is
considered a critical attitude. Stoicism adapts the subject to the existing order and
Scepticism detaches the subject from it. These two attitudes are embodied by Nietzsche,
whose life consisted in an oscillation between illness and health. Therefore, a
conversation around Nietzsche between a Stoic and a Sceptic is actually a conversation
between clinical theory and critical theory taking place within Nietzsches head.

PART ONE

Twilight Psychedelia

which is the asymmetrically dialectical narrative of a time of despair and in

which the presence of dark thoughts dominate the scene. In and through it the
31

reader learns that the strength of one time becomes the impoverishment of
another time. And at the end of an intense and yet condensed meditation in the
form of an interaction between Post-Structuralism and Critical Theory, I find
myself standing firm outside in a perilous time. In this part it looks as though
there is nowhere to go on, no one to go on, and that with each sentence the writer
is moving further away from what he is trying to say. And yet, out of the blue, an
unexpected truth emerges and the conditions for the possibility of going on are
sustained. The voyage turns out to be more perilous than it at first appears to be.
Once the end of this first part of the voyage is reached my visions sharpen and
turn against their subject. This sharpening of visions and turning against their
subject is looked at through Lacans and Kleins theories

CHAPTER I: Life and Death in a Raving New World

1. Freud and Einstein

In 1931 the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation invited certain
intellectuals to communicate and think about the solutions to the problems facing the
world. The First World War was over but the second one was already knocking on the
door. The developments in central Europe were signs of the approaching disaster.
32

Einstein was one of the intellectuals the Institute got in touch with, and he proposed
Freud as a participant in this collaboration. In 1932 Einstein wrote a letter to Freud and
asked him how the tendency of humanity to war, destruction and violence could be
overcome, if it could be overcome. Einstein expected Freud to come up with some
practical solutions. Einstein wanted revolution, but a great admirer of Darwin, Freud
talked about evolution.10
Freud responded to Einstein after about a month. Throughout the letter Freud
emphasized that he couldnt do what Einstein expected him to, that it was impossible for
him to come up with practical solutions to the problem of aggression inherent in human
nature.
In his response to Einsteins letter Freud interrogated the relation between the
aggressive impulse in human nature and the organization of society and concluded that in
the organization of social order aggression was unavoidable.
In the second part of his letter Freud mentioned the role played by drives in the
inner world of human beings and summarized his theory of drives. According to Freud
the polarity between the forces of attraction and repulsion, which Einstein was familiar
with as a physicist, also existed in the human psyche. One of these forces was the life
drive which aimed at self-preservation and unification, the erotic force represented by
Eros. The other force was the death drive which aimed at destruction and splitting,
represented by Thanatos.
But we must not be too hasty in introducing ethical judgements of
good and evil. Neither of these instincts is any less essential than
the other; the phenomena of life arise from the concurrent or
10

Einstein on Peace, ed. Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden (New York: Schocken Books,
1960), 186-203
33

mutually opposing action of both. Now it seems as though an

instinct of the one sort can scarcely ever operate in isolation; it is
always accompaniedor, as we say, alloyed with a certain quota
from the other side, which modifies its aim or is, in some cases,
what enables it to achieve that aim. Thus, for instance, the instinct
of self-preservation is certainly of an erotic kind, but it must
nevertheless have aggressiveness at its disposal if it is to fulfil its
purpose. So, too, the instinct of love, when it is directed towards an
object, stands in need of some contribution from the instinct for
mastery if it is in any way to obtain possession of that object. The
difficulty of isolating the two classes of instinct in their actual
manifestation is indeed what has so long prevented us from
recognizing them.11
For Freud the death drive was targeting the living organism, aiming at turning the
organic into inorganic. Because of the intervention of the self-preservative force of the
life drive, the death drive was turned towards the external world by a psychic operation,
so that the self-destruction of the organism was prevented.
It is important to note here that the death drive does not correspond to selfdestruction. The death drive postpones the self-destruction of the organism by projecting
aggression onto the external world and hence can be said to serve self-preservation. The
self-destructive impulse turns against itself and manifests itself as violence and
aggression against the others. The subject kills the others not to kill the self. The death
instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is
11

Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Society, and Religion, trans. Angela Richards (London:
Pelican, 1985), 357
34

directed outwards, on to objects. The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by
destroying an extraneous one.12 It is this scenario that makes it possible to say that there
is a disjunctive synthesis at work here. A term coined by Gilles Deleuze, disjunctive
synthesis defines the operation in and through which the two components of an apparatus,
a psychic apparatus in this case, appear to be two differently conceived constituents of the
same thing.
The influence of Nietzsches concepts of the will to nothingness and eternal return
is pervasive in Freuds later work. Freuds turn towards metapsychology and his
consequent creation of the concept of the death drive is rooted in his need for something
to fill in the gaps in his scientific and empirically observable theories owing much to
Darwin. Freud was uneasy with the concept of the death drive on account of its nonscientific nature, but nevertheless he had to conceptualize the death drive as the
counterpart of the life drive in order to be able to go beyond the pleasure principle.
Educated as a neuroscientist, Freud was aware that he was contradicting himself and
perhaps even turning against his earlier attitude towards the human psyche by showing
that at the beginning was the death drive and that the life drive was only an outcome, a
kind of defence against the death drive.
In his Civilization and Its Discontents Freud talked about the oceanic feeling, a
sense of oneness with the world which he admits to have never experienced personally.
Perhaps his creation of the highly speculative concept of the death drive was Freuds
attempt to fill the gap opened by the absence of this oceanic feeling for him.
Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the
dwelling-house was a substitute for the mothers womb, the first

12

Freud, Civilization, Society, and Religion, 357

35

lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he
was safe and felt at ease.13
In his An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud had put forward the idea that drives
produce affects and so drives are at the root of all actions. I agree with Freud that drives
are at the root of all actions at the beginning, but contrary to what Freud says of them, I
think affects are not mere manifestations of the drives. Rather, affects emerge as a
response to the changes in the level of the intensity of external stimuli. The external
stimuli create affects towards objects and the drives find their satisfaction through the
affective quality of the objects produced to match the drive. But it is precisely this
matching process that produces the desire for the object, so the unconscious drive turns
into conscious desire.
In his 1920 essay Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud revised his drive theory
and introduced his concept of the death drive. In this revised drive theory Freud
conceptualized the life drive as inclusive of both the libidinal impulses and the selfpreservative impulses. As for the death drive, Freud conceptualized it as the selfdestructive impulse. So, at the beginning Freud argued that libidinal impulses contain
sadistic elements as well. While in his first drive theory in On Narcissism (1914), Freud
suggested that aggression should be included within the life drive, in his second drive
theory in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, he says that aggression is the will to return to
the inorganic state and is therefore directed against the self and serves self-destruction.
According to this picture, if adaptation is essential to survival then aggression is against
life and is a manifestation of the death drive.

13

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (London:
Penguin, 1985), 279
36

In the face of the present situation I project a few alterations onto Freuds drive
theory in the light of Lacans theory of the subject. Since thought is a product of the brain
and since most psychoanalysts agree that metaphysical phenomena are composed of
psychosomatic events, there is nothing other than a fantasy that fills the space between
the soma and the psyche. This fantasy (I,) stands in for the nothingness in between them;
it unites them as it splits them apart. I disagree with Freuds theory concerning the source
of drives. But I do make a distinction between the conscious desires and the unconscious
drives.
Lacans contribution to the field is his realization that the unconscious drives are
shaped by the external circumstances and turned into conscious desire. For me Lacans
theory, however, just like Hobbess metaphor of modern power, the Leviathan, remains,
to use Donald Winnicotts terms, a mere transitional object, which helps to situate the
psychosomatic events in the context of sociopolitical theory.
I now return to Hobbes through Foucault, whose thoughts on death and its relation
to power become relevant to the subject of drives, their source, and their processes of
formation.
2. The Void, Drives, Automata
The most important thing that Hobbes says in Leviathan, which I think is still
relevant to a considerable extent, is that death is the absolute master, and the fear of death
forces the subject to adapt to the existing social order. Leviathan feeds on this fear of
death, and it is Leviathan itself that instills the fear of death in people. 14 If we keep in
mind that in Western societies death is associated with nothing/ness, it becomes clearer
why and how Foucaults use of Jeremy Benthams Panopticon in Discipline and Punish
14

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in Law and Morality: Readings in Legal Philosophy,

eds. David Dyzenhous and Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1996)
37

as a metaphor of the modern power structure which has nothing/ness at its centre gains
new significance.
At the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this
tower is pierced with white windows that open onto the inner side
of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of
which extends the whole width of the building; they have two
windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the
tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell
from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a
supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman,
a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect
of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out
precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of
the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres,
in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and
constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities
that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize
immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or
rather of its three functions to enclose, to deprive of light and to
hide it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full
lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness,
which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.15

15

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1977), 200
38

Foucault, without directly referring to him, shows that Hobbess monster has
become a machine. I argue that this machine is itself in a process of transformation today,
and is in the way of taking the form of something that is neither organic nor inorganic,
neither visible nor invisible, but felt. This is power as affective force. Power can no more
be represented by metaphors. For metaphor is a concept that belongs to the world of
metaphysics which exists only as a fantasy world, whereas today power has a more
material existence than it has ever had and its materiality splits as it unites the
psychosomatic and the sociopolitical realms of experience.
The automatization of power, that is, transformation of power from an organic
state, as demonstrated by Hobbes, towards an inorganic state, as demonstrated by
Foucault, has been studied in a different way and in a different context by Mark Poster in
his Foucault, Marxism, and History. Influenced by Posters interpretation of Foucault in
relation to Marxism, and in the context of the relationship between discourse and power, I
reassert, in a different way and for different reasons, that Foucaults conceptualization of
the Panopticon is useful and yet insufficient in understanding the workings of power
today in the face of the recent developments in technology.
In this new situation the subjects know that they are still locked in the Panopticon,
but pretend that they are free floating across the Superpanopticon. This is because they
are being locked deeper into the Panopticon; and there finding themselves dismembered,
losing themselves in the terrible condition of being pushed further into the hitherto
undiscovered corners of their own rooms, in their cells.
A new formulation of Foucaults concept of bio-power, the Superpanoptic
discourse reverses the roles of Eros and Thanatos; abuses our understandings and
misunderstandings of the life drive and the death drive, as well as manipulating our inner
39

conflicts and turning us into antagonists. It does this by erasing the necessary boundary
between life and death, the organic and the inorganic, so as to create the conditions of
possibility for manufacturing an illusory sense of oneness with the world, hence uniting
the subject of statement (the enunciated) and the subject of enunciation which should
remain separate from and/but contiguous to one another for the perpetual transformation
and multiplication of life forms to take place at the same time.
Now I will attempt to make a leap forward in the direction of theorizing a
practical way of handling the conflict between material production and metaphysical
production. In what follows, therefore, I try to show how this conflict arises and how it
turns into an antagonism.
It is the projection-introjection mechanism operating within and through the
capillaries of the body without organs across the new Earth only to reproduce that which
it had attempted to expel as an organ without a body on the old Earth that produces the
two poles of the unhealthy conflict. One being social and the other metaphysical, and
being against one another, these two are feeding neither themselves nor the other, but
contributing to the production of otherness as negativity, hence taking part in the setting
of the very vicious trap in which they find themselves against each other and out of which
they both come dismembered. They are locked in an agonizing process, which is
destroying both of them. It is impossible for one to survive without the other, and yet they
prefer to eat one another. Social production produces exclusion of the other, metaphysical
production produces an illusory image of the other. When these two modes of production
work together they create the conditions of impossibility for a non-illusory and nonantagonistic mode of being.

40

We shall add to this, that although the problem is inherent in the projectionintrojection mechanism itself we are looking for the source of our maladies outside. We
are projecting all our bad qualities onto the others and then accusing them of being
negative towards us. In turn we are giving birth to the negativity of the other, or otherness
as negativity. The negative within and without us is being created by us since we introject
what we have projected and inversely.
3. The Subject and Power
The relationship between the subject and power is a theme that has played a
significant role in determining the direction of European thought since Nietzsche, Marx,
and Freud. Both the Frankfurt School thinkers such as Horkheimer and Adorno, and the
poststructuralists such as Deleuze and Foucault, took on this subject as one of the objects
of their studies in different ways. Although I was deeply influenced by Adornos
Negative Dialectics and Marcuses Reason and Revolution before the beginning of this
thesis, I later on turned towards Deleuze and Foucault to find tools for repairing the
restrictive implications of the early Frankfurt School thought. I think post-structuralism
and critical theory have a lot more to offer to one another that can be used in practical
critique of the predominant order in particular and nihilisms in general, than many, such
as Habermas, suggest.
Having taken what I wanted from both parties, I asymmetrically placed them into
one anothers contexts with the aim of analyzing the relationship not only between poststructuralism and critical theory, but also between theory and practice. I projected these
two forms of thought onto one another. My aim was to theorize a practical way of
looking at the world which could be turned into action in accordance with the demands of
the present. I used practical Kleinian looking glasses and what I saw was and remains
41

uncanny. I found Thomas Hobbes and Michel Foucault in the form of a snake biting its
own tail in a cell, with Marcuse standing firm outside the cell as the guardian angel under
the guiding hand of Reich and his orgasm theory. Upon the emergence of this image that
in time took shape on the stage of my internal theatre, I finally managed to determine my
direction and object of study.
The point of departure of this thesis is the modern discourse on power that
emerged with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. A response to metaphysics and
Christian dogmatism, Enlightenment is a system of thought which proclaims itself to be
governed by universal reason alone. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and
Adorno situate Marx and Freud, together with themselves, in this tradition. I situate
Foucault himself in this same tradition of Enlightenment.
Foucaults interpretation of the Panopticon, and Thomas Hobbess Leviathan
become relevant here precisely because they present us with metaphors representing an
idealized model of modern power structure which takes its driving force from the
exploitation of the conflict between the psyche and the soma, reason and non-reason, the
life drive and the death drive.
This power structure is not only still dominant, but also increasing its dominance
as it decreases its visibility. It does this by making the subjects believe that they are
governed by the reality principle when in fact they are governed by the pleasure
principle. This situation causes a shift in the subjects conception of health. Ill come
back to this in the future, but now I have to mention something else which is very closely
linked to this shift in the subjects conception of health.
Enlightenment signifies the secularization of the authority of the Big Other, and
erection of instrumental reason in the place of the absolute authority of the Bible. In this
42

light Enlightenment appears to be merely a change of roles between the masters and the
slaves; the problem inherent in the metaphysical world of representation remains the
same. Walter Benjamin, for instance, warns against this trap set by the panoptic
mechanism which creates a Leviathan within the subject. In his essay, The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Benjamin argues that cinema can turn out to be
a fascist propaganda machine if it falls in the wrong hands. Benjamin is not only against
the aestheticization of politics but also the politicization of aesthetics. What remains
unthought in Benjamins essay, though, is the ideology of representational and
metaphysical conceptions of non-reason, which is itself the problem inherent in the
structure of the system.
Here it is also important to emphasize my difference from Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse considered modern western capitalist societies to be sick. He thought himself as
the healthy subject outside a sick society and determined his goal as the healing of this
sick society. Marcuses political philosophy as therapy is no more sufficient for the
increasingly sophisticated problems of today. For power has become more than
oppressive/repressive.
4. The Imprisoned Creators of Our Times
If we look at the contemporary electronic music scene we see that the three
dimensional sounds created are non-representational to such an extent that it is as though
there is a living organism from a completely other dimension making organic noises in
the room. I will return to the relevance of electronic music in a little while, but first let me
revisit Herbert Marcuses theory of how capitalism keeps itself alive by feeding on the
death of the counter-subjectivities and the life of the dominant consuming subject
governed by the life drive which is itself externally constituted within the subject.
43

In a nutshell, Marcuses theory in One-Dimensional Man was that the one

dimensional market society absorbs and turns the counter-cultural products into its own
agents, reducing the two-dimensional to the one-dimensional, hence making the forces of
resistance serve the purpose of strengthening what they are counter to. Marcuses
problem was the dissolution of the two-dimensional sphere of counter-cultural production
and its domination by one-dimensional relations. He suggested using mythological
imagery not only to make sense of the pre-dominant social reality, but also to create a
counter-social reality which would at the same time be a critique of the existing social
reality. What Marcuse said is still relevant to a certain extent, but to be able to use this
theory one has to adapt it to the demands of the present situation. What I will attempt to
do, therefore, is to ignore the irrelevant parts of Marcuses theory and try to find out those
parts of it that matter for my concerns. It is true that Marcuses theory is no more
sufficient in understanding and solving the problems of our Superpanoptic societies. And
yet in it there are lots of insights with high potential for development in the service of
psychosomatic and sociopolitical progress today.
Today even Madonnas latest release, Confessions on the Dance Floor, is
produced in a DJs room in London. The electronic dance music products are mostly
produced in peoples bedrooms on a personal computer donated with software especially
produced for making electronic music. The recent shift in the gears of electronic dance
music, of course, is a cause of the amazing possibilities the digital sound machines
present. These machines have no material existence; they are loaded on the computer in
the form of digital data. One can have a studio loaded into ones computer by pressing a
few buttons on the keyboard. In this context, making music requires technical knowledge
of the tools of production more than the knowledge of the rules of what is called making
44

music. With electronic music the sounds are already there, loaded into the computer; all
one needs to do to become a music producer has become putting these sounds together,
making them overlap with one another in a positively disordered way and produce
something that is neither the one nor the other.
If we imagine for a moment Beethoven making his music after the orchestra plays
it, composing the piece after it is materialized, we can see how paradoxical the situation
the producer is caught up in inherent in the production process of electronic music is. It is
as if Beethoven wrote the notes of his music as he listened to the orchestra play it. We can
see that this is in fact exactly the opposite of what Beethoven did. For in the case of
Beethoven, unlike the electronic music producer, it is the internal orchestra in the psyche
that plays the piece as Beethoven writes it, not an actual orchestra in its material
existence. With electronic music that internal orchestra is not in the creators mind, but in
the computer.
Some of the more creative and experimentalist logics in this field record the
noises coming from within their bodies, or from within other animals bodies, load them
into the computer, and with the aid of synthesizers and effects units, turn these noises into
the basic rhythms and melodies of their music. Heartbeat, for instance, can be used as
drum and bass at the same time in some electronic music recordings. It is possible to dubout, echo, delay, deepen, darken, lighten, slow down, or fasten up the sound of heartbeat
with the computer. And after a proper mastering process you get something that sounds
neither totally organic, nor totally inorganic. These products are not only digitally bought
and sold on the internet, but also exchanged with similar other products.
The affective qualities of these products are extremely high. The producers of the
five most developed forms of electronic music, which are Techno, House, Electro,
45

Trance, and Breakbeat, claim that they are the beholders of the threshold between the
soma and the psyche, that with their walls of sound they keep them separate and yet
contiguous to one another.
What we witness in this time is Aldous Huxleys Brave New World turning into
Rave New World. A world in which the well known and the so called lines between mind
and body, fantasy and reality, nature and culture, organic and inorganic, life and death,
are not just blurred, but have completely disappeared. And yet, at the same, these lines
are in the process of reappearance.
The recent developments in electronic music present us with a good example of
how the inorganic has become, at least in sound, more organic than the organic. With the
rapid development of sound-producing machines it has become possible to create such
sounds that while listening to it one feels like there is a living organism from a strangely
familiar realm making noises in the room, or worse still, that the noises are coming from
within ones mind and body. Listening to this kind of music makes the mutual
exclusiveness of the somatic and the psychic irrelevant. Especially after the three
dimensional medium presented by CDs and DVDs it has become possible to present the
sound to masses in a form that sounds more real than the original, live recording.
It would be wrong to assume, as many have done, that this kind of music is in
touch with only a few listeners. On the contrary, since not only the listeners but also the
producers of this kind of music have started to occupy dominant positions in the
advertisement production business, it is not surprising that electronic music, and
especially the underground minimal techno, is increasingly being used as the background
music surrounding the object advertised in many advertisements on radio and T.V. Based
on the erasure of the boundary between the psychic and the somatic, or between the
46

inorganic and organic, the use of minimalist electronic music in the advertisements of
todays hectic life-styles is a very good example of the exploitation of the life/death
drives inherent in contemporary nihilistic culture driving and driven by what has almost
become transglobal capitalism. The LG U880 ultra-slim mobile phone advert on T.V. is
precisely the hard-core of how this exploitation of the life/death drives takes place. In the
advert there is heart beating in the phone. Or, the heart is shown to have a transparent
phone surrounding it. And with the minimalist techno at the back, that is, sounds that are
neither organic nor inorganic but both at the same time. The beating heart in the phone
creates the deep and dark bass sound with extremely electronic and yet organic sounding
noises coming from within the phone. Its as though it is ones own heart beating in the
phone; this phone is you, so its yours... If we keep in mind that the transparency of the
phone is fleshy, for there are capillaries of the phone, the overall impression created is
one of ultra minimalist life reduced to its bare bones when in reality the LG U880 mobile
phone is itself the product of exactly the opposite of an ultra minimalist attitude. The
message is that this mobile phone is what attaches you to life, when in fact it detaches
you from life as it is. The finishing words, Life is Good, only confirms my critique of
this advertisement, of this marvellous sound-image which is an inorganic object disguised
as a living organism. It is obvious that whats at work here is the exploitation/oppression
of the life/death drives, as the inorganic replaces the organic, and the real of death in the
midst of life is expelled.
In this situation in which I found myself Benjamins and Marcuses theories are
insufficient in that they do not realize that it is precisely the reversing of the roles policy,
that is, presentation of something as its opposite, of an inorganic entity as an organic
entity for instance, or of that which is inside as if it is outside, that has to be left behind,
47

for Panopticon and Leviathan are within and without the subject at the same time, and a
reverse of the roles of the inside and the outside means nothing in this perilous time.
For the solution of problems posed by the advanced projection-introjection
mechanisms of what have become Superpanoptic societies, I attempt to show that poststructuralism and critical theory have never been as mutually exclusive as many suggest,
especially in terms of the wrong and right questions that they left unanswered. If we look
at Adornos and Foucaults writings we can see that most of their thought is directed
towards finding how to reconcile theory and practice. Just as theory and practice, poststructuralism and critical theory, too, are always already reconciled, because they come
from Nietzsche, Marx, Freud. They may be always already reconciled but the only way to
actualize this reconciliation is to realize their common goal; to put theory in the service of
ordinary life, to develop the conditions of existence, and to practise freedom.
It will almost sound offensive to say that the new emerges only if some people
become traitors and shake the foundations of their own mode of being, or at least
undertake opening up spaces so that light can shine among all, or death can manifest
itself. But one must take the risk of offending some others, for every situation requires its
expression, every problem bears within itself at least half of its own solution. It is all a
matter of putting theory and practice in the service of one another. Theory that does not
match the truth of its time is for nothing. It is important to theorize practical ways of
dealing with the banal accidents of an ordinary life. I think what I have just said is one of
the things that both Foucault and Adorno would have agreed on.
5. The Nietzschean Subject
Here I turn to Nietzsche who creates the concept of bad conscience as the
generator of illness, which is in turn fed by the illness it generates, giving birth to the man
48

of ressentiment.16 Nietzsches ressentiment is what Klein calls envy. To be able to see the
link between envy/ressentiment and the will to nothingness/the life-death drives, I shall
start from the beginning, from the first year of life.17
In a world where everything is new for the subject, nothing is symbolic. The
subject is born into the symbolic order, and yet there are many other symbolic orders
totally different from the one into which it is born. The subject, in a nomadic fashion,
moves from one symbolic order and into another. The shift from one and into the other is
so sudden that it is almost unrecognisable. In its new symbolic order, the subject is
experiencing everything for the first time; just like the child in the first year of life. The
child becomes the mediator between an external reality and an internal one. Nothing is
good or evil yet. The inner world is composed of part-objects which are fluctuating bits
and pieces of imagery, a mass of misery. The child, through its actions, not only subverts
the symbolic order but also produces some new reality. There are many questions the
infant knows not how to ask as yet. For Melanie Klein this is the paranoid-schizoid
position of the child through and after which the child learns to make a distinction
between the good objects and the bad objects. The paranoid-schizoid position is followed
by the manic-depressive position; that is when the child becomes an unhappy
consciousness because it learns that the mothers breast is good and bad at the same time.
Lacans mirror-stage a period of Imaginary identifications-- is a version of Kleins
manic-depressive position, which consists in a series of Narcissistic illusions and
imaginary identifications through which the child learns to act upon the objects
surrounding him/her.
16

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.

Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1969), 33-6
17
Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, (London: The Hogarth
Press, 1984), 29-32
49

The Nietzschean subject is always at the periphery and perpetually in touch with
the objects surrounding him. In fact he is not only in touch but also is defined by them.
This subject is produced through what it consumes. The subject buys things and those
things determine the subjects identity which is a non-identity. The subject becomes what
it consumes, it projects what it has introjected. In a world full of violence, destruction and
death, or madness in every direction, as Kerouac would have said, the subject becomes
nothing but a projector of the evil within society. This paradoxical nature of the
contemporary Nietzschean subject is a result of the turning of self into the other within in
the process of becoming. The self of the present has not only become a prison-house of
the others within itself but also it itself has become a self-contained monad with no
relation to the outside and no awareness of the external world populated by the others
selves.
The relation of a subject to the objects surrounding him/her shows us something
about the subjects relation to death. In a world in which use value as opposed to
exchange value is important, the subject gets to know the nature of the objects and death
more profoundly. But today use value is itself determined by exchange value. The world
today is almost exactly the opposite of a world in which nothing is a substitute for
another thing.
With societies based on exchange value the relationship between the subject and
the object is confined in the paranoid-schizoid position. There remains no gap between
the subject and the object when in fact there should be. Everything becomes a substitute
for another thing and everything is substitutable. With the advance of global capitalism
the subject itself becomes an object. The subject begins to act itself out as an object for
the desire and consumption of the other. The subject becomes a substitute of itself. With
50

global capitalism the subject starts to feel itself as a machine; it becomes inorganic for
itself when in fact it is essentially organic. In other words organs start to operate like nonorgans, all organicity is replaced by inorganicity, life with death, and in this kind of a
society everyone is always already dead.
Global capitalism indeed appears to have rendered everyone equal in relation to
each other. They all have the equal rights to consume but in no way have all the means to
do so. This status of the subject as a mere consumer, objectifies the subject as a subject of
consumption. The subject is reduced to a consuming-excreting machine(naturally), or a
mechanism of introjection-projection(culturally). That makes everyone substitutable by
anyone else; they can take on each others roles, act themselves out as they are not, as
someone else is. In other words rather than become no-one, no-body, imperceptible, they
become something exchangeable and expendable. And yet it is only on the condition of
feeling oneself as nothing rather than something, feeling of self as nothingness, can one
go beyond ones symbolic life driven by striving for security and omniscience. The
subject should start to see the reduction of self to nothingness as a gain when from the
perspective of the already existing symbolic order it is a loss of the difference of
everything in relation to a subject or an object. In the absence of this kind of a subject
who does not want to become an ordinary symbolic person, herd-instinct dominates all
subjects. With the advance of global capitalism this herd-instinct can be said to have
become nothing but a result of the exploitation of the life and death drives to reduce life
to a struggle for and against life/death. The subject no longer has to carry the burden of
being different. In this light and in this time we can see global capitalism creating not
only the conditions of possibility for the subject to forget itself but also the conditions of

51

impossibility for a remembrance of self, producing the non-knowledge of self as the

counter-knowledge.
Now that Nietzsches autobiographical book Ecce Homo has become a symptom,
an effect of his previous books, the other within of his oeuvre, in most parts of Europe,
but especially in the United States of America and Britain, this book is considered to be a
prescription for the predominant way of healthy living. It will almost sound offensive
to say that the other within of the past has become the self of the present, the non-reason
inherent in reason has become the reason itself, and yet the questions remain:
1. What can be learned from Nietzsches failure, which caused and continues to
cause many other failures?
2. What are the conditions of possibility for a non-antagonistic and yet nonillusory relationship between the self and the other and how can they be
sustained?

Intermediation 1

In the previous chapter I tried to introduce certain Freudian concepts in relation to

post-structuralism and critical theory. The importance of this first chapter lies in its
attempt to link the concepts of the life drive and the death drive created approximately a
century ago to contemporary cultural and critical theory. In the next chapter I will try to
frame the context of the disagreement between Klein and Lacan in relation to Freud. The
aim of this second chapter is to link the life drive and the death drive to the processes of
introjection and projective identification. The chapter also includes an analysis of
52

Derridean deconstruction in relation to the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive

position in the context of introjection and projective identification. On the whole the
following chapter aims at connecting psychoanalytic theory and practice to more
philosophical issues concerning creative and critical processes.

CHAPTER II: The Controversy

Now, the history of depths begins with what is most

terrifying: it begins with the theatre of terror whose
unforgettable picture Melanie Klein painted. In it, the
nursing infant is, beginning with his or her first year, stage,
actor, and drama at once. Orality, mouth, and breast are
initially bottomless depths. Not only are the breast and the
entire body of the mother split apart into good and bad
object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces,
53

broken

into

crumbs

and

alimentary

morsels.

The

introjection of these partial objects into the body of the

infant is accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness
onto these internal objects, and by a re-projection of these
objects into the maternal body. Thus, introjected morsels
are like poisonous, persecuting, explosive, and toxic
substances threatening the childs body from within and
being endlessly reconstituted inside the mothers body. The
necessity of a perpetual re-introjection is the result of this.
The entire system of introjection and projection is a
communication of bodies in, and through, depth.18
Gilles Deleuze.
1. Nature, Culture, and Lacan

According to Lacan a psychoanalysable subjects drama is an outcome of the

conflict between nature and culture. As Claude Lvi-Strauss put it, this conflict arises
from the incest taboo, which is a result of the prohibition of marriage among family
members who are tied to one another by blood.
It is modern structuralism that has brought this out best, by
showing that it is at the level of matrimonial alliance, as opposed
to natural generation, to biological lineal descentat the level
therefore of the signifierthat the fundamental exchanges take
place and it is there that we find once again that the most
18

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, (London:
Continuum, 2003), 187
54

elementary structures of social functioning are inscribed in the

terms of a combinatory.19
From the perspective of structuralism the incest taboo produces the cultural
family and separates it from the natural family. The incest taboo is the effect and the
cause of the conflict between nature and culture. Oedipus delivers the subjects role in
society and hence gives the subject its cultural and sexual identity. This separates the
subject from its non-identity and forms the basis for the conscious desires to flourish. All
that is repressed in this process gives birth to the unconscious. But the unconscious is not
a pool in which the repressed waste material is accumulated; rather, it is a theoretical
construct to explain what happens to the repressed material but which nevertheless has
discernible effects in everyday life and behaviour.
For Freud, with the resolution of the Oedipus conflict the period of primary
narcissism comes to an end. All that the subject wants is to get back what it had lost upon
entry into the symbolic order through Oedipus. The subject loses the sense of
omnipotence and is in pursuit of a narcissistic sense of oneness. Each time the subject
steps it tries to step towards the pleasures of narcissistic satisfaction of the first step, and
yet with each step moves further away from it.20 Lacans narcissistic period, the mirror
stage, is the period after the period of an unmediated relationship between the child and
the mother and it is in the mirror stage that the child identifies himself with his whole
image on the mirror to become what his mother wants him to be. Identification with the
mother turns into identification with the selfs whole image on the mirror which is
assumed to be the object of mothers desire. Since the child cannot yet make a distinction

19

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XII, The For Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 150
Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction, trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth
Press, 1964)
55
20

between the me and the not-me, and sees himself as one, the child is as yet a mere
(subject), that is to say a subject that is not a subject of culture.21
The child exits the order of nature and enters the order of culture through
symbols. It is a symbolic entry to the world of symbols in which a subject becomes the
subject. A symbol fills the space in-between the child and the mother and is the third
world, the imaginary world between the symbolic and the real, which takes the place of
the unmediated relationship between the other two.
The reflection on the mirror sets in motion the numberless introjective-projective
processes that the subject will experience throughout his/her life. Seeing the whole image
of self on the mirror helps the subject to develop a self-consciousness as a separate being
neither in-itself nor for itself. The awareness of selfness brings with it the awareness of
otherness. The subject distinguishes between the me and the not-me. This situation cuts
the subject in two halves; one half is the omnipotent exhibitionist and the other half is the
object of the gaze of others. Realizing that the subject is not only the observer but also the
observed produces a self-conscious consciousness; being conscious of self as that which
can never be fully conscious of itself.
The subject is produced in and through language. When the subject says I the
symbol becomes the mediator between the internal and the external worlds, which means
that language splits the subject and the object as it unites them. Following the mirror
stage The Name of the Father completely ends the unmediated relationship between the
child and the mother and establishes its own laws and institutions. The symbolic father is
he who has what the mother lacks and to whom the mother is subject. The father deprives
the mother and the child of their unmediated relationship and deprives the mother of the
21

Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London:
The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977)
56

phallus. For Lacan, the civilizing castration, the castration that turns the human child into
a cultural subject, does that by directing the child from being to having. Rather than being
the phallus the child begins to want to have the phallus. It is the absence of the phallus
that is established rather than the phallus itself. In pursuit of the phallus as a substitute for
the unattainable mother, the subject obeys the fathers law. The constitution of the phallus
as a lack opens a gap between the subject and the object. It is this gap, this lack, this
absence that is the unconscious and renders the conscious subject possible. What man
lacks is a mythological totality symbolized by the phallus. And this lack is a condition of
the subject. The subject and its unconscious are produced at the same time. Language
turns the human child into a non-subject, it gives him his sexual identity, at the same time
produces unconscious drives and situates the subject in the symbolic order and induces
pain.
Oedipal discourse forms the basis for the deliverance of the subjects sexual
identity and is the discourse of the other, the unconscious. For the subject to be able to
use language, first he has to acquire language. In the learning process the unconscious
manifests itself in and through slips of the tongue, jokes, and dreams. Slips of the tongue
and jokes reveal the real of the speaking subjects desire. The unconscious is the
condition of conscious discourse.
For Lacan, language is the condition of the unconscious. The symbolic order
constitutes the unconscious drives. That which the subject wants is the unmediated
experience of existence lost upon entry into the symbolic order. The rupture between
being and non-being opens with language and in the unconscious the symbol of the
fullness of being, completeness of the subject, is the phallus. And the phallus is that
which the subject had lost upon entry into the symbolic order. But since the subject has to
57

use language to attain the lost object, his striving for wholeness is in vain, which renders
him tragic and exhilarating. For as I said earlier on, as the subject thinks that he is
stepping towards the real of the desired object he is in fact moving further away from it
with each word he adds to his vocabulary.
Here I would like to tell the most known of the Oedipus myths, but at the same
time the one that is least known as an Oedipus myth, the story of Adam and Eve. We shall
listen to Adam and Eves story as though it is our own story. For man perpetually runs
after his dreams, and as he does this he moves on through disappointments. I shall
therefore stress the significance of disappointment and frustration in psychoanalytic
discourse.
Adam eats the forbidden apple given to him by Eve. Counter to what Genesis and
Milton say, I think the relationship between male and female is built on a prohibition.
Adam eats the apple. Adam is expelled from paradise for doing that which shouldnt have
been done. He is banned from the heaven on earth (Eden) and is nailed to pain and
suffering. And he is promised paradise after death. But why is an apple prohibited in
paradise? Because as a cultural fantasy, paradise is the other of something forbidden, it is
the product of this forbidding. If the law, the symbolic, is removed from the scene, all
symbolic meaning collapses. And since it is law that produces the unlawful, since it is
repression that forms the unconscious, there can be no symbolic order without the fantasy
supporting it and keeping the unconscious drives at bay.
It is the sense of primary Narcissism that is the desired object of fantasy, a sense
of oneness with the world, omnipotence, and completeness. So life doesnt end with
death, it reaches its most complete form in the womb, it begins with a death. Life is a
striving for a death oscillating between a forbidden death and a promised death. Death
58

pulls the subject towards itself with all the attraction of its staticity, or stasis. Eros and
Thanatos are twin brothers.
Expulsion of Narcissism is a condition of cultural life. Narcissus, this beautiful
man, falls in love with his own image on the water. His love for himself prevents him
from seeing the love presented to him by culture--Echos love. Narcissus leans forward to
touch his image and leans so much that he falls and drowns in the water, dies in his own
image.22
This period of primary Narcissism is what Lacan calls the mirror stage. As I have
shown in the previous pages, at this stage there is a conflict between the Ideal-I and the I
22

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of The Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (The University of
Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 1995), 126-27-28 The Greek myths do not,
generally, say anything; they are seductive because of a concealed, oracular wisdom
which elicits the infinite process of divining. What we call meaning, or indeed sign, is
foreign to them: they signal without signifying; they show, or they hide, but they always
are clear, for they always speak the transparent mystery, the mystery of transparence.
Thus all commentary is ponderous and uselessly verboseall the more so if it employs
the narrative mode, and expands the mysterious story intelligently into explanatory
episodes which in turn imply a fleeting clarity. If Ovid, perhaps prolonging a tradition,
introduces into the fable of Narcissus the fatewhich one might call tellingof the
nymph Echo, it is surely in order to tempt us to discover there a lesson about language
which we ourselves add, after the fact. Nevertheless, the following is instructive: since it
is said that Echo loves Narcissus by staying out of sight, we might suppose that Narcissus
is summoned to encounter a voice without body, a voice condemned always to repeat the
last word and nothing elsea sort of nondialogue: not the language whence the Other
would have approached him, but only the mimetic, rhyming alliteration of a semblance of
language. Narcissus is said to be solitary, but it is not because he is excessively present to
itself; it is rather because he lacks, by decree (you shall not see yourself), that reflected
presenceidentity, the self-samethe basis upon which a living relation with life, which
is other, can be ventured. He is supposed to be silent: he has no language save the
repetitive sound of a voice which always says to him the self-same thing, and this is a
self-sameness which he cannot attribute to himself. And this voice is narcissistic precisely
in the sense that he does not love itin the sense that it gives him nothing other to love.
Such is the fate of the child one thinks is repeating the last words spoken, when in fact he
belongs to the rustling murmur which is not language, but enchantment. And such is the
fate of lovers who touch each other with words, whose contact with each other is made of
words, and who can thus repeat themselves without end, marvelling at the utterly banal,
because their speech is not a language but an idiom they share with no other, and because
each gazes at himself in the others gaze in a redoubling which goes from mirage to
admiration.
59

as the object of the others desire. It is this that splits the subject. In other words every
individual re-experiences the tragedy of Narcissus at the back of his/her mind throughout
life. And it is this regressive re-experiencing that produces and is produced by the real of
the subjects desire.
The fathers law forbids identification with the mother and promotes
identification with the object of the mothers desire. The fathers law is the law of the
culture. If the child doesnt obey the fathers law, that is, when the child refuses to leave
the mirror stage behind, the child cannot move on to the next stage and distinguish itself
from the others; it resists codification. This is what a schizophrenic is. To be locked in the
mirror stage is to be a schizophrenic. Here the subject experiences existence as an
illusory reality. He can do nothing to act upon the world for he doesnt know what use the
objects surrounding him have. The schizophrenic who refuses to pass from fathers
civilizing castration, is he who escapes cultural codification. And culture locks away the
mad into a cell with mirrors on all walls that hide the secrets. A chain of identifications
with the objects of others desires begins when and if the subject passes through the
fantasy world of the mirror stage and becomes rational. It all ends with an idealized war
culture, when and if culture is built on and through the Name of the Father.
We can see this in Tolstoys War and Peace. The order of culture has two poles:
On one pole is the unmediated love, on the other pole is the idealized war. In War and
Peace Prince Andrey, although he loves his wife very muchor rather because he loves
her so muchchooses to leave her behind and go to war to fight Napoleons armies. He
follows greater ideals, for the future of Europe, and leaves behind the little world of the
females; he chooses to go in search of his Oedipal destiny.

60

2. No Replica?
Klein is the first psychoanalyst to analyse a pre-verbal and pre-Oedipal stage of
development, that is, before the child starts to hate the father and wants to unite with the
mother whom he believes to contain the fathers penis. In her Psychoanalysis of Children
Klein gives a good example of how this adaptation to reality takes place:
The small patient will begin, for instance, to distinguish between
his make-believe mother and his real one, or between his toy
brother and his live one. He will insist that he only meant to do this
or that to his toy brother, and that he loves his real brother very
much. Only after very strong and obstinate resistances have been
surmounted will he be able to see that his aggressive acts were
aimed at the object in the real world. But when he has come to
understand this, young as he is, he will have made a very important
advance in his adaptation to reality.23
Klein analyses the process of adapting to reality in terms of the childs relation to
his mothers body. In the first year of life it is through introjection of the mothers body
as the embodiment of the external world that the child learns to relate to reality. At this
stage the child sees the breast as the representative of the mother. The child projects his
own reality onto the external world and believes that the mothers breast belongs to him.
When the flow of milk is interrupted the child becomes aggressive towards the mother
and bites the breast. According to Klein this is the paranoid-schizoid position
characterized by oral sadism.

23

Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975), 11
61

Klein associates this attitude of the child with the dynamics of an adult
schizophrenic mind. A child who cannot yet make a distinction between the inner reality
and the external world is like a psychotic adult who cannot make a distinction between
what belongs to his fantasy life and what to the external world.
A good example to this situation can be selected from the Hollywood horror
scene. What we see in the Red Dragon, for instance, is a man who over-identifies with
Hannibal Lecter, and becomes what Hannibal Lecter identified with in the first place; a
psychotic serial killer who identifies himself with Blakes Red Dragon.
The psychotic serial killer who believes himself to be constructing a work of art
with stories of his murders, sees his criminal acts as the actualization of a prophecy, an
incarnation of the myth of Red Dragon. It is through William Blakes painting, Red
Dragon, that the character is familiar with the myth of Red Dragon. Towards the end of
the film we see him literally eating, incorporating, Blakes original painting. That is when
his total transformation from bodily existence to a mythological dimension beyond the
flesh takes place. Until that point in the film he is governed by the Red Dragon, now he is
the Red Dragon, which means that he no longer takes the orders from a force outside of
himself. He has introjected the source of power and has become his own master against
himself. And perhaps he even believes that his becoming is complete now.
3. The Significance of Kleins Fantasies
It was Klein who emphasized the importance of fantasies and playing in the
process of development. In her Psychoanalysis of Children Klein brought to light that as
humans we perpetually oscillate between paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive
position throughout life. Klein categorized the death drive as more dominant in the
paranoid-schizoid position and life-drive as more dominant in the depressive position.
62

For Klein a successful therapeutic procedure would result in maintaining a contact with
the intermediary realm between phantasm and reality. Kleins importance lies in her
acceptance and affirmation of our most primitive drives role throughout life. The need
for satisfaction of those drives sometimes reaches to such inordinate measures that we
become aggressive in the face of reality. Frustrations arise and things get worse, for we
dont know how to turn our frustrations into fuel for the life drive, and eventually fall
victim to the death drive in search of omnipotence.24
According to Freud, as he puts it in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,
drives were governed by the pleasure principle and the object of satisfaction of these
drives was not very important. In other words, between the drive and its objects there was
no natural tie.25 But for Klein, who prefers the word instinct instead of drive, from the
beginning of life onwards instincts are connected to certain internal objects. From the
beginning of life the human subject is in pursuit of object relations in the way of
satisfying the instincts such as hunger and thirst.26
Kleins shifting conceptualisation of the process of subject formation can be
clearly observed in her analysis of the relationship between The Early Stages of the
Oedipus-Conflict and Super-Ego Formation. Klein takes the beginning of socialization
to a pre-Oedipal stage, a pre-verbal if not pre-linguistic stage, to the first year of life.
When a baby is born it immediately is in the world of objects. And language, being the
extension of the world, that is, being one of the objects surrounding the subject, is
24

Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975)
25

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality, trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth Press,
1964)
26

Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1984)
63

immediately at the disposal of the subject just like any other object. We must keep in
mind, however, that from language Klein understands not only the words but also the
objects such as a toy soldier, or a ball, or any other object. Now, the baby as the subject
throws its toy soldier at the mother to get her attention, or to articulate that it is hungry.
This action of the baby is similar to someone sending a letter to his/her lover to articulate
that he/she has missed him/her and wants to have sex soon. It is in this larger context that
we understand language not only as words but also as everything that is at hand.27
According to Freud, Lvi-Strauss, and Lacan, the formation of the subject begins
with the appearance of the Name of the Father and his law prohibiting incest. It is only
with the father saying, No, you shall not desire the mother, but try to be the object of
mothers desire, that the child experiences his first confrontation with the symbolic
order. But in Klein this process is related to the development of object relations in a time
where there is imaginary meaning and not symbolic meaning.
Klein attributes great significance to the unconscious phantasmatic workings of
the mind. The unconscious which for Freud and to some extent Lacan is a static state of
being becomes the site of a continuity in dynamism and the time of a perpetual
phantasmatic production. For Klein, the object of psychoanalysis may be the
Unconscious, but the object of psychotherapy is this unconscious process of phantasm
production. Kleins therapeutic technique involves bringing the patient face to face with
the Real of his/her desire. In this process very primitive and archaic aspects of the human
subject are put into the spotlight.
Early analysis offers one of the most fruitful fields for
psychoanalytic therapy precisely because the child has the ability
27

Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975)
64

to represent its unconscious in a direct way, and is thus not only

able to experience a far-reaching emotional abreaction but actually
to live through the original situation in its analysis, so that with the
help of interpretation its fixations can to a considerable extent be
resolved.28
When a child creates imaginary characters, pretends that they are real and talks
with them, this is considered as playing, but when an adult does the same thing he is
considered to be a schizophrenic, a subject of psychosis. Schizophrenia is a term coined
by Bleuler to designate a set of symptoms such as loss of memory and excessively
regressive behaviour usually associated with old age. The schizophrenic experience, as
understood by Bleuler, is the reliving of childhood near death in the form of a
disorganizaton and loss of the pieces constituting the memory.
[] by projecting his terrifying super-ego on to his objects, the
individual increases his hatred of those objects and thus also his
fear of them, with the result that, if his aggression and anxiety are
excessive, his external world is changed into a place of terror and
his objects into enemies and he is threatened with persecution both
from the external world and from his introjected enemies.29
Klein describes schizophrenia as the attempt to ward off, master or contend with
an internal enemy.30 This theme is linked to Kleins discussion about the dynamic of
envy. For Klein, the child, not yet capable of making a distinction between what is inner
and what is outer, attacks the source of possible gratification. Envy is a product of a
28

Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1975),9
29
Klein, 143-4
30
Klein, 144
65

fantasy that the breast is good all the time because it supplies the child with milk
whenever he wants. When the milk is denied to the child the child believes that the
mother is bad because she is withholding the source of good. The child splits the object
into good and bad to save the good breast from possible damage caused by his attacks on
the bad breast. Klein goes on to say that it is at this stage that the child develops a sense
of external reality by beginning to see the mother as another person, and the breast as a
whole object which is good and bad at the same time. This is the depressive position in
which the same object has conflicting significations for the child. Understanding that he
has been attacking not only the bad breast but also the source of good induces guilt in the
child who in turn learns why not to be envious. Klein sees guilt as therapeutic of envy.
What appears to be the illness turns out to be the source of good in Kleins therapeutic
procedure. With Klein therapy is reaffirmed as the process of reconciliation through
which a rational subject is created.
4. Klein, Lacan, and Psychosis
For Lacan there is this solipsistic period of life at the beginning. The subject
becomes capable of making a distinction between himself and others after the Narcissistic
period of the mirror stage. The subjects ability to interpret and adapt shows signs of
progress. Once the mirror stage is passed through and the fantasy is traversed, the subject
becomes capable of controlling the unconscious drives and touching reality. The child
learns to postpone gratification and finds other ways of satisfying himself. The function
of the I shows itself when the child feels the need to act upon the external world and
change things in the way of attaining pleasure and satisfaction of desires. When the child
gives up desiring his mother and realizes that he has to identify with his father the
foundations of the super-ego formation are laid. It is the fear of castration that leads the
66

male child to give up the mother. The sexual desire turns away from the forbidden object
and moves towards finding ways of expressing itself in and through metaphors supplied
by the predominant culture.
According to Klein the formation of the super-ego begins in the first year of life.
For Klein the early Oedipus conflict is at the root of child psychoanalysis. Klein says
that Oedipal tendencies of the child start with oral frustrations and this is when the superego takes its course of formation.
These analyses have shown that oral frustrations release the
Oedipus impulses and that the super-ego begins to be formed at the
same time. [] This is the beginning of that developmental period
which is characterized by the distinct demarcation of genital trends
and which is known as the early flowering of sexuality and the
phase of the Oedipus conflict.31
It is Kleins legacy to have taken the beginning of development to a stage earlier
than the appearance of the Name of the Father. In this world the castrating father figure
doesnt yet exist. And the child has at least three years ahead to become capable of using
language. Kleins journey into a zone before language, a zone before the child finds itself
in the signifying chain, is valuable especially for showing the lack of the role of fantasy
and phantasmatic production in Lacans story of the formation of the subject. And Gilles
Deleuze uses Kleins insight to make the necessary connections between literature and
the unconscious. But before moving on to Deleuze I would like to show from where
Klein is coming and hint at the direction she could possibly be heading towards.

31

Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, 123

67

Klein attributes as much importance to the death drive as she does to the life
drive. For Klein, already in the first year of life there are object relations and these
relations involve expression of libidinal and aggressive impulses.
[] unfavourable feeding conditions which we may regard as
external frustrations, do not seem to be the only cause for the
childs lack of pleasure at the sucking stage. This is seen from the
fact that some children have no desire to suckare lazy
feedersalthough they receive sufficient nourishment. Their
inability to obtain satisfaction from sucking is, I think, the
consequence of an internal frustration and is derived, in my
experience, from an abnormally increased oral sadism. To all
appearances these phenomena of early development are already the
expression of the polarity between the life-instincts and the deathinstincts. We may regard the force of the childs fixation at the oral
sucking level as an expression of the force of its libido, and,
similarly, the early and powerful emergence of its oral sadism is a
sign that its destructive instinctual components tip the balance.32
The child projects his aggressive impulses onto the external world and sees the
object (the mothers breast) as an enemy trying to destroy him. The frustrations that take
place in the first year of life cause anxiety and lead the child to express his aggressive
impulses through oral sadism (biting the breast). The fantasy that the mother contains the
fathers penis leads the child to want to tear apart the mothers body and introject the
object hidden in it through oral sadism. After oral frustration the attention of the child
shifts from the mothers breast to the fathers penis. The aggression against the fathers
32

Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, 124

68

penis and the response this aggression gets plays a dominant role in the formation of the
super-ego. As it develops the super-ego becomes more and more important in the way the
subject handles his relation to the world.
[] by projecting his terrifying super-ego on to his objects, the
individual increases his hatred of those objects and thus also his
fear of them, with the result that, if his aggression and anxiety are
excessive, his external world is changed into a place of terror and
his objects into enemies and he is threatened with persecution both
from the external world and from his introjected enemies.33
An aggressive attitude towards the external world damages the relationship with
the external world; the external world is regarded as hostile, which leads to aggression,
and this aggression in turn provokes hostility against the child. It is this kind of a vicious
cycle in which many psychotics and neurotics find themselves. Klein describes
schizophrenia as the attempt to ward of, master or contend with an internal enemy. 34
For Klein, the force of aggression as a result of oral frustrations can reach to such levels
that the subject feels obliged to project the super-ego ideal onto the external world. The
super-ego is terribly ruthless and aggressive. The projection of the super-ego onto the
external world turns reality into an enemy. The subject becomes ill and shuts himself up
into his fantasy world and, detached from reality, suffers inordinately. Lacan sees
schizophrenia in a similar way; for Lacan what produces schizophrenia is the exclusion
of the Name of the Father.
With Klein we learn that the sense of reality is gained through oral frustrations.
Lacan, too, thinks that frustrations have a role to play in the constitution of the reality
33
34

Klein, 143-4
Klein, 144
69

principle. But according to Lacan whats important is not the natural frustrations
themselves, but how they are symbolized, how they are represented in and through
language, how they manifest themselves in the form of cultural products. Lacan finds
Kleins theories too biological.
To explicate where Lacan and Klein disagree I would like to give their opinions
on Dick who is a four years old boy suffering from psychosis. Dick, who hardly ever
talks, is permanently indifferent towards the external world. In Dicks world there is no
good and bad, there is nothing to be afraid of and nothing to love. It is as though Dick
lives in a world apart, in another reality. Dicks world is not structured like language,
there is no differentiation, and where there is indifference there can be no difference, in
Dicks world all objects and subjects are one.
Dick has a toy train which he repetitively moves to and fro on the floor. Klein
says, I took the big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them Daddy train
and Dick train. Thereupon he picked up the train I called Dick and made it roll [toward
the station] I explained: The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy. 35 At the
end of this first session of therapy Dick begins to express his feelings. It is after Dick
becomes capable of situating himself within the symbolic order in relation to his mother
and father that he becomes a human. He begins to play his role given to him by Klein.
Human reality is a mediated reality. We can see in Dicks case that the biological
turns into cultural through Oedipalisation. Lacan thinks Kleins therapeutic technique is
correct but her theory wrong. What Lacan thinks Kleins theory lacks is the castrating
father figure who says No. Lacan complains that the castrating father figure is not
given a role in Kleins scenario. It is true that father is not given a role in the process of
subject formation, but Lacans assumption that Klein is Oedipalizing the child is wrong.
35

Melanie Klein, quoted from Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus, 45

70

For if the father is excluded from the scene how can the Oedipal triangle be formed. All
Klein does is to tell Dick that mummy and daddy copulate. Kleins world is entirely
biological, whereas Lacan is talking about the subjectivation of the individual in and
through symbols. For Lacan the unconscious is nothing other than a chain of signifiers.
There is nothing before the symptoms manifest themselves in and through metaphors. So
metaphors are the products of repression which splits the subject into two separate but
contiguous sides; the biological self and the cultural self. Psychoanalysis is about a
regressive process which goes back in time through a chain of signifiers and tries to reach
the Real of the subjects desire. A symptom is the manifestation of the Real of the
subjects desire in the form of metaphors.
In advancing this proposition , I find myself in a problematic
positionfor what have I taught about the unconscious? The
unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject,
it is the dimension in which the subject is determined in the
development of the effects of speech, consequently the
unconscious is structured like a language. Such a direction seems
well fitted to snatch any apprehension of the unconscious from an
orientation to reality, other than that of the constitution of the
subject.36
When Lacan says that the unconscious is structured like a language, what he
wants to say is that if the unconscious is a web of metaphors the signifiers behind the
metaphors are interacting with one another just like the signifiers in language.

36

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain

Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 149
71

In psychosis the subjects fantasy of unmediated omnipresence resists

symbolization. The subject cannot turn his feelings and thoughts into symbolic acts, he
cannot make a distinction between the me and the not me, cannot engage in
intersubjectivity. Introversion dominates the psychotic and he finds himself in a world
where nothing matters for nothing is differentiated. The psychotic experiences his inner
reality as though it is the reality of all, he cannot separate the inner from the outer. The
psychotics reality escapes cultural codes. The psychotic doesnt know the symbolic
meaning of the fathers law. The law of the father establishes the order of culture, but the
psychotic refuses to come to terms with the fathers law and eventually cannot overcome
his frustrations. The mothers role is determinant in the formation of psychosis. If the
mother doesnt recognize the role of the father the child remains locked in the imaginary
world, outside signification.
Psychosis appears when all the signifiers refer to the same signified. Language
and meaning dissolve. Locked in the mirror stage the subject identifies everything as me,
and the me as the phallus. But the reality is that the I is not the phallus inside the
mothers body. The psychotic is deprived of nostalgia, of the feeling of loss which is
constitutive of the subject. Lacking lack the psychotic subject lacks what Lacan calls
lack in being. And lacking lack in being the subject cannot identify his natural self as
being separate from the cultural objects of identification. By entering the symbolic order
the narcissistic sense of oneness, the oceanic feeling, is lost. And this loss opens a gap
within the subject, which the subject tries to fill with the objects of identification
presented to it by the predominant culture. Identification is a way of compensating for the
emptiness within the subject caused by the loss of sense of oneness. But the unconscious
desires can never be satisfied by metaphors. To overcome the frustration caused by the
72

loss of his fantasy world, the subject turns towards symbolic acts in the way of climbing
up the social ladder. The subject becomes a doctor, pilot, teacher; all to endure the pain of
not being able to satisfy ones unconscious desires, or the Real of ones desire. It is in this
context that Lacan sees repression as productive of the subject as a split subject. Because
the psychotic has lost nothing, lacks nothing, he has no motivations for such pursuits as
becoming a doctor, pilot, or teacher. The psychotic has no sense of nostalgia and he is
therefore extremely indifferent to the external world. Experiencing no frustrations in the
face of the harsh reality of not being one, the psychotic desires nothingness.
5. Klein, Derrida, Deconstruction
According to Klein we all oscillate between the paranoid-schizoid position and
the depressive position throughout our lives. This means that none is normal since the
world is a place in which all kinds of abnormalities take place all the time and nobody
can be a normal person independently of all these abnormalities. One may choose
withdrawal and indifference in a Stoic fashion, but who can claim that this is normal?
The only thing that is normal is that nothing is normal.
Klein used the word position as she was creating her concepts to designate
moods which one finds oneself in throughout life. It is necessary to underline the word
position because the word position is especially chosen to signify psychic conditions
rather than stages of a linear course of development. The paranoid-schizoid position and
the depressive position are complementary situations of the subject in a non-linear
course of development which attaches to the death drive, as much important a role as it
does to the life drive in the course of development. It is obvious that for Klein the
relationship between regress and progress is not in the form of a symmetrical binary
opposition.37
37

Melanie Klein, Our adult world and other essays (London: Heinemann, 1975)
73

If we keep in mind that creativity means creating a meaning out of the

meaningless chaos we can see how Kleins theory can be used in the service of a critical
theory aiming at destroying the static unities and recreating non-static formations.
Influenced by Klein, Wilfred Bion developed a theory of thinking concentrating on what
Keats called negative capability. Negative capability is the ability to remain intact in the
face of not-knowing throughout the thinking process. While Klein emphasized the
negative aspects of the paranoid-schizoid position and gave a more important role to the
depressive position in the developmental process, Bion argued that fragmentation of
previous theories is as important as the reintegration process for the emergence of new
thought.

For

Bion

the

subjects

oscillation

between

the

paranoid-schizoid

position(splitting) and the depressive position(synthesizing) is necessary for a healthy

creative process to take place giving birth to new thought.38
Counter to the reparative and reconciliatory tendencies towards reconstructing the
pre-dominant symbolic order, the poststructuralist subject of the death drive aims at
explicating the problems inherent in the structure of the existing symbolic order. It is a
response to the loss of an imagined future and involves a negation of the existing order
which is based on negation and in which the subject finds/loses itself. The subject as the
death drive is simultaneously the effect and the cause of splitting. The subject as the
death drive occupies the other pole of faith. Its domain begins where belief ends. Its
domain is a realm where silence and non-being confront the daily banalities of symbolic
societies. In this realm nothingness and substance confront each other.

38

Wilfred Bion. A Theory of Thinking, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London:

Karnac, 1967)

74

As the subjects intensity of self-consciousness increases, so does its pain and

anxiety in the face of death. This causes hopelessness and despair which may or may not
lead to a total devastation of the project of inverting and putting into the spotlight the
nothingness at the centre of the subject. Heidegger repeatedly puts all this down in Being
and Time when he says that being-towards-death is angst. One cure for expelling
anxiety has been to believe in god, any other metaphysical construct, or in some cases it
has even taken the form of a materialist system of thought; in all these cases, however, an
escape is seen as a solution when in fact it is the problem itself. For our concerns, an
escapist attitude, and especially one that tries to go beyond the physical, does not work at
all, for what we are looking for is a way of learning to make use of the reality of the death
drive as an interior exteriority constitutive of the subject as a creative agent.
The self-conscious subject questions itself. With the thought of death the subject
gets in touch with the death drive and pushes itself further towards the periphery of the
symbolic order and becomes its own persecutor in the service of a critique of the status
quo. The subject of the death drive shakes the foundations upon which is built its own
mode of being. Its mode of being becomes its movement towards non-being. It is the
perceiver and the perceived of its own, the subject and the object of its actions, the
persecutor and the persecuted at the same time. Through the death drive one can go
beyond ones symbolic role and become conscious of its time and place in the world. The
use of the death drive requires recognition of death as the absolute master. That way one
can become reconciled to life as it is.
In critical theory we usually have to read the text at hand in an unorthodox way so
as to create a new meaning out of it. The critical theorist breaks-down the meaning of the
text and out of the pieces recreates a new meaning, which is to say that creativity bears
75

within itself destructivity and inversely. It may not be necessary to destroy something
intentionally to create something new, but to have destroyed something is usually a
consequence of having created something new. Jacques Derridas reading strategy called
deconstruction exposes how a text writes and unwrites itself against its dominant
meaning and in contrast to common sense perception. I see Derridas corpus as an intense
meditation on the meaning of meaning itself. First Derrida shows the dominant meaning
of the text as perceived by the majority and then he exposes the other within of the text,
the minor meaning which contradicts the major meaning. By doing this Derrida makes
not only the absolute meaning of the text collapse in on itself but also causes the concept
of absolute meaning itself to explode from within. In Kleinian terms what Derrida does is
to start from the depressive position and then move to the paranoid-schizoid position and
there apply the splitting process peculiar to the paranoid-schizoid position to the text. It
can be said that in a way Derrida exposes the paranoid-schizoid position within the
depressive position. By doing this Derrida shows that the life drive and the death drive
are within and without one another at the same time. This means that for Derrida creation
and destruction are one. It is for this reason that I find deconstruction insufficient for
effective critique to take place. For without the affirmative recreation of the destroyed
text there remains nothing outside the ruins of the past. But that the new is inconceivable
from within the pre-dominant context does not mean that it is impossible. What Derridas
deconstructive practice lacks is the active intervention in the predominant order which
would create the conditions of possibility for change, out of the conditions of
impossibility. Derrida remains paralyzed in the face of the infinity of possibilities for
change by declaring that the chain of signifiers is infinite and therefore nothing is outside
the text when in fact nothing is this infinity itself since when there is infinity then
76

everything disappears and nothing conceivable remains within the text. It is true that
deconstruction dissolves the transcendental signified but the question remains: What is
the price paid when the transcendental signified is deconstructed rather than affirmatively
recreated and turned into an immanent sign here and now. In Derrida there is the waiting
for the new to arrive but no action is taken in the way of making this arrival possible now.
We shall ask why not recreate oneself as the new, why not do it now and give birth to the
new here and now, why not be the new in action? In a fashion similar to Hamlet, Derrida
perpetually postpones the action by playing with language and ends up locking himself
up in an endlessly deferred self-perpetuating, self-consuming, and self-reflexive endgame
with no beginning and no end, making it impossible for conscious desire to engage in
effective action.

Conclusion of Part I
Barbaric Regress and Civilised Progress contra Deconstruction and Affirmative
Recreation
In Homers Odyssey the call of the sirens is a sign addressed to men who can only
survive this seductive call by turning a deaf ear to it, by ignoring, not acknowledging and
repressing their desire for it. If the desire is of a visual object then you can turn a blind
eye on it, or you may prefer not to close your eyes and just look at the object of desire;
you can be a voyeur or an innocent witness if you wish. But the sexual sign that targets
the ear is much more dangerous. The ears dont have lids. And the voyeurism by ears, in
contrast to normal voyeurism, can only give pain rather than pleasure. In Leonard
Cohens song, Paper Thin Hotel, the mans pain listening to the sexual intercourse next

77

door is immeasurable; but if there was a hole on the wall, things could have been
otherwise.
Odysseus way of protecting himself from the call of the sirens is different from
his companions. He doesnt stop his ears with wax; quite the contrary, he is more than
willing to hear the call. But against the danger of following the call he has himself tied on
the mast. The oarsmens stopping their ears to the call, and Odysseus having himself tied
to the mast so as not to follow the call, are the two different versions of resisting the
sirens. While the former is a measure taken by the ego against the object of desire, the
latter is that of the super-ego. In stopping ones ears with wax whats at stake is a will not
to hear, pretending as though the object of desire didnt exist, the desire is repressed, and
the object is forgotten. Whereas by having oneself tied to the mast one hears the sirens,
the desire is accepted but not pursued; the object is consciously resisted. But what is this
thing that is so forcefully prohibited, which when adhered to leads to death, and when
ignored makes life so boring and existence so banal? To this question there are two
answers which in the end become one.
The first answer is Lacanian: the call of the sirens represents the desire for the
mother. This desire for the mother is neither totally instinctive, nor totally sexual. It
belongs to a period where the instinctive and the sexual are one. This desire is prohibited
by the father. And the acceptance of the impossibility of uniting with the mother causes
growth. Every child desires the whole of the mother, not just parts of her. The mother,
however, is fragmentary from the beginning; in Adam Phillips words, the mother is
promiscuous. So there is the tragedy: on the one hand there is the obsessive attachment,
and on the other hand there is the paranoid reaction.

78

There is an abundance of texts depicting the tragedy born of the tension between
promiscuous women who are openly open to other relationships at all times and
obsessively in love men who are hypocritically monogamic throughout the history of
literature. The femme fatale is nothing but the archetype of the unsatisfied desire for the
mother.
With the law of the father the desire for the mother becomes a real call of the
sirens. If the child obeys the call, the result is death, or a psychotic existence signifying
death. In psychosis the subject builds his life on an obsession for the unattainable mother,
and his every act will be in the way of attaining the warmth, security, and protective
environment of the womb. Not to become a psychotic the child chooses another way; he
chooses to close his ears to the call and obey the law of the father; but then he becomes
an ordinary neurotic. Perhaps the best way to choose is to face and accept the desire for
the mother, acknowledge the call of the sirens, but not to follow it.
The second answer to what the sirens signify is Freudian. Following Freuds later
work one can say that the call of the sirens represents the death drive. If the oarsemen of
Odysseus hadnt stopped their ears with wax, the voyage would have ended in death. The
bee that is seduced by the colourful flower which feeds on insects flies to its death.
Following Freud, Herbert Marcuse says that the drive to reproduce the species, the life
drive, and the drive to destroy, the death drive, are both for and against one another, that
is, the life drive and the death drive are within and without one another at the same time.
There are many forms in which the death drive manifests itself. These vary from
melancholia to aggression, from self-destruction to paranoia. What is common to all these
form of appearance is a kind of revolt against having been born. The death drive wants
jouissance, a condition in which infinite satisfaction is possible and in which repression
79

and release, pain and pleasure do not exist. Freud explains this obsessive and neurotic
desire with the concept of the compulsion to repeat; a desire to return to a previous state
of being in the history of being. And needless to say, this is a desire to return to the
womb, to the state of being before birth. So we can see that the death drive and the desire
for the mother signify and are signified by the same will; the will to nothingness. The
refusal to accept having been detached from the mother, the will to reunite with her, and
the will to return to the womb, signify and are signified by the same desire. Unless
accounts are settled with the will to nothingness the subject remains trapped somewhere
between paranoid schizophrenia and obsessive neurosis and cannot reach the point zero
which is where the real love and affirmation of life flourish.
In contemporary nihilism a mentally healthy person is defined thus: the one who
has managed to repress the death drive, who has attained inner harmony and who has
been able to project this inner harmony onto the external world in the way of healthy
social life, in other words, one who has established a perfect balance between the ego, the
id, and the superego, and who knows how to control the destructive impulses and even
direct these impulses to professional life. This healthy subject has become capable of
reconciling himself with life and with others, who has become a part of the world of
goodness. This is the typical healthy subject as defined by the pre-dominant discourse of
contemporary nihilism.
From the perspective of contemporary nihilism the exact opposite of this type of a
healthy individual would be from the world of badness. Someone whose ego cannot be
reconciled to the external world, and who is undergoing a fragmentation. His death drive
has become so dominant that he has become aggressively destructive of both the self and
the other. He is at a loss. His emotional ties with the external world have been cut. He has
80

no sense of value, truth, meaning. He feels nothing for the world of goodness. Eventually
the death drive produces the most aggressive response imaginable to the conflict between
civilized progress and barbaric regress constitutive of contemporary nihilism. But that the
response of the death drive is the most aggressive one does not mean that it is destructive,
on the contrary, it gives aggression a new form. It is not aggression that is bad in-itself,
rather, whats important is the form aggression takes.
Unfortunately today many forms of critical attitude towards global capitalism take
on a nihilistic, reactive, and slavish role, rather than an affirmative and active response,
and fall victim to their own ressentiment, or what Klein would have called envy. I think a
critical attitude towards this nihilism produced by the conditions of global capitalism
should be in the way of developing a practical theory of theoretical practice for change,
driven by and driving an interaction between deconstruction and affirmative recreation -a cont(r)action -- rather than total negation leading to barbaric regress and violence.
It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which
occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with
what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous
conformity: the Event. It is in this sense that the amor fati is one
with the struggle of free man. My misfortune is present in all
events, but also a splendor and brightness which dry up misfortune
and which bring about that the event, once willed, is actualized on
its most contracted point, on the cutting edge of an operation. All
this is the effect of the static genesis and of the immaculate
conception.39

39

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, transl. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 149
81

That at the root of every progressive movement there is a traumatic incident, war,
destruction, suffering, pain, is as yet a commonly held opinion. What we see through the
opposition between civilized progress and barbaric regress is that both these
attitudes, these two differently conceived forms of nihilism, have at their core the life
drive disguised as the death drive and inversely: they are towards totalitarianism and
stasis rather than dynamism and multiplicity. Both ignore the foundational question
which is how to be and let the other be rather than to be or not to be. The problem today
is to know how to become what one is without confining the other into the realm of nonbeing. How to create the self in such a way as not to be destructive of the other and itself
at the same time?

PART TWO

Crafty Cuts

in which I find myself and my sharpened visions turned against their subject. Here is
there where I might have said, if I had a voice to say, how the sharpening visions of the
subject turn against their subject. And would go if I could have gone, to the culmination
point of all these directions, where there is one marvelous sign. I see that the more
affirmative ones attitude towards life gets the more fragile the contact with the other
becomes. Paradoxically, as I show myself to have found myself standing firm outside in a
time of derangement and loss of oneness, the reader witnesses that as the contact
becomes more fragile and affirmation more difficult, maintaining the conditions for the
82

possibility of affirmative cont(r)act becomes more essential to the continuation of a life of

self in touch not only with the death of the other but also with the death of oneself.
CHAPTER III: Cinema and Psychoanalysis

1. Cinematic Apparatus and The Psyche

Ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to

their real conditions of existence.40
Ideology has a material existence.41

For Freud dreams are the beholders of the sleeping subject; dreams prevent
waking up by turning a repressed desire into images. 42 How does the dream do that? To
be able to answer this question we have to look at Freuds concept of the Unconscious
and how the repressive mechanism works.
With Christopher Columbuss discovery of America the civilized were brought
face-to-face with primitive groups of people. In the case of Freuds concept of the
unconscious, the civilized were facing their own wild side, the other within them. By
discovering the unknown continent Columbus opened new fields for exploitation. As for
Freuds concept of the unconscious, it was its inescapable destiny to be subjected to
exploitation. And with the advance of technology it becomes easier and easier to exploit
the unconscious. Hollywood, political strategists, advertisement writers and many others
burning with desire for more money and power thought it was a merit to develop
40

Louis Althusser, The Ideological State Apparatuses, from Mapping Ideology, ed.
Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1994), 123
41
Althusser, 125
42
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon
Books, 1965),101-8
83

technologies for the manipulation and exploitation of the unconscious. But Freuds
discovery was aimed at serving almost exactly the opposite purpose. Freud meant the
unconscious to stand in for the other of a way of thought that tended to explain and define
everything in terms of its exchange-value and conformity to the established order. Freud
aimed at bringing people face to face with the truth of their being; that their rationality
couldnt exist without its opposite, the unconscious. In the unconscious, the drives that
resist symbolization are in constant interaction with one another and yet without this
chaotic interaction between the unconscious drives there can be no reason. How hard
civilization tries to escape from the Real of desire by establishing truths with no basis and
how hard it must have been for them to face the non-reason inherent in their reason,
which they so proudly prohibited. Freud not only opens the way of access to that
forbidden zone, but also names the unconscious mental processes, and calls this long
forgotten forbidden zone the unconscious. So, in a way, Freud is not only Columbus but
also Amerigo Vespuci.
Freud calls the content of the unconscious the latent dream-thoughts.43 That which
one sees in a dream is already a translation of this primal scene. The images in a dream
stand in for the gap in the symbolic order; they symbolize the latent content of the dream,
which are the unconscious drives. A dream turns these unconscious drives into the
manifestations of the subjects objects of desire. The subjects dream is already a semisymbolized form of the unnameable traumatic kernel, the Real of the subjects desire. In
the unconscious there is no desire, but only an oscillation between the life-drive and the

43

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965),

101-8

84

death drive. What the dream does is to supply the unconscious with objects to which it
can attach its drives, give them a meaning and turn the unconscious drives into conscious
desire. Dreams keep the natural and the cultural separate but contiguous to one another.
Dream language is closer to the dynamics of the unconscious than the logic of fantasies.
Fantasies are more social than dreams and are the supports of the symbolic order, they are
the products of a desire to fill the gap between the Real and the social reality. So the
objects of desire, with which the subject finds itself bombarded by, shape the subjects
unconscious drives and determine what the subject will desire, what it will not.
The object of ones desire plays a dominant role in the subjects identification
processes. But there remains a gap between the object of desire and the object of
identification. This split between the subjects objects of desire and objects of
identification, the choice the subject makes at this very moment determines the subjects
identity, and yet the subject is not conscious enough to make the simplest choices, so this
choice always turns out to be a forced choice.
We can see an example of this forced choice in Levity directed by Ed Solomon
(2002). It is a film about a murderer who kills a young cashier and consequently gets
jailed for life. He is released on good behaviour but when it comes to getting out of the
prison he refuses to do so. They tell him that he has no choice but to choose freedom, the
life outside the prison. He unwillingly leaves the prison. This man was feeling so guilty
that being in prison was his only way of surviving the anxiety caused by his aggressive
behaviour in the past. He believed he deserved this punishment and was happy to
participate in its execution. He was, if not his own persecutor, at least his own executor.
He became his own crime and punishment at the same time. It was his free choice to be
in prison, that way he fantasized he was being redeemed. And with this phantasm he was
85

cutting himself off from carrying the burden of his crime as a free man. With the jury
telling him that he is now free, he does not have to be punished anymore, his fantasy
collapses. He realizes that redemption requires an external source. That by believing he
was being redeemed didnt mean that he was really being redeemed. He has to be
redeemed in the eyes of another, in the eyes of the ones who suffered the most because of
his crime.
In a standard process of development the subject is expected to choose the objects
of desire from the opposite sex and the objects of identification from the same sex. The
subject introjects the objects of the same sex as objects of identification and the objects of
the opposite sex as objects of desire. In turn the subject projects his introjected objects of
identification onto his objects of desire, the other sex, strengthening his image of self in
the eyes of the objects of the same sex who are his/her objects of identification.
What turns the latent content into the manifest-content and manifest-content into
symbols is called the transference mechanism, or the dream-work. The analyst becomes
the machine interpreting the patients free associations, which is what the dream-work
does to the unconscious drives and turns them into metaphors.
For, owing to the fact that dream-interpretation traces the course
taken by the dream-work, follows the paths which lead from the
latent thoughts to the dream-elements, reveals the way in which
verbal ambiguities have been exploited, and points out the verbal
bridges between different groups of materialowing to all this, we
get an impression now of a joke, now of schizophrenia, and are apt

86

to forget that for a dream all operations with words are no more
than a preparation for a regression to things.44
Freuds technique of interpretation aims at a reversed metamorphosis; the
analytical process tries to reach the hidden-content through the manifest-content. So
Freud has to retranslate the manifest content as close to the hidden content as possible.
The hidden content is unattainable, and yet the reversed metamorphosis at least makes
some progress in the way of initiating a backward motion, a regressive process. To
initiate this regressive process Freud uses the technique of free association. Free
association is used to make hitherto unmade connections between the manifestations of
the unconscious in the way of translating the unconscious into conscious or semiconscious terms. Repression produces the hidden content of the unconscious. Free
association aims at making the hidden content manifest itself in and through metaphorical
constructions of reality. If the therapeutic process is successful the subject begins to use
metonymies.
From cinema we have the example of a pair of black leather shoes stepping up the
stairs. In this context the black leather shoes is a metonymy, and signifies that the
murderer is approaching. Murderers shoes stand in for the murderer as a whole person.
This is also how Kleins partial-object takes the place of the object as a whole. Or, the
body without organs turns into an organ without a body. The objet petit a stands in for the
master-signifier, just like the breast stands in for the whole of mother. The operation at
work is similar but objet petit a and the partial-object are not the same thing. Object petit
a is the fantasy of something that is considered to be lost and/but which actually no one
has ever had. Whereas the partial-object is the fantasy of the part as the whole, the subject
44

Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards

(London: Penguin, 1984), 237
87

does not yet know that the wholeness is lost, it feels that the part is the whole. In the
fantasy of the objet petit a there is less consciousness than there is in the fantasy of the
partial-object.
With Freuds free association and Kleins play therapy, the subject learns to give a
voice to the traumatic kernel, the Real of his unsatisfied desires. The subjects realization
of the unnamability of the Real is a sign of progress in the therapeutic process. So in a
way the therapeutic process has to fail for progress to take place. The quality and the
quantity of gaps, black holes, or white spots within a discourse produced by free
association show the extent of loss and dissatisfaction of the subject.
According to Freud the dream-work deforms the unconscious drives and turns
them into a more acceptable form so that the subject can come face to face with them.
This is like an actor who changes his costume and appears with a different identity in the
second stage of a play. There are two psychic processes involved in the dream-work.
These are displacement and condensation. For Freud the process of displacement
involves a kind of change of roles between cultural values and libidinal energy. The aim
of displacement is to project substitutes for the unnamable and disowned aspects of the
self so that the subject can reintroject those split off parts of the self in more acceptable
forms. This process of displacement can be clearly observed in fetishism. A fetishist
directs his/her desire to an object other than the real object of desire. For instance if the
object of desire is the penis the subject of desire replaces the penis with a shoe; the shoe
stands in for the real object of desire.
As for condensation, it involves a concentration of secret thoughts at one single
point, a kind of movement towards one single object, so all the thoughts intermingle and
disappear, they become an unrecognisable multitude of thoughts. Condensation is a kind
88

of unconsciously willed confusion; a defence mechanism to keep the unwanted qualities

of the self at bay.
2. Dream, Fantasy, and Film
If the film and the daydream are in more direct competition than
the film and the dream, if they ceaselessly encroach upon each
other, it is because they occur at a point of adaptation to reality or
at a point of regression, to look at it from the other direction
which is nearly the same; it is because they occur at the same
moment: the dream belongs to childhood and the night; the film
and the daydream are more adult and belong to the day, but not
midday to the evening, rather.45
In The Imaginary Signifier Christian Metz emphasizes a very important aspect of
the relationship between cinema and the unconscious. The dream belongs to childhood, to
the night, to the unconscious, the Real; whereas film and fantasy belong to adulthood, the
symbolic, and consciousness; and yet, this consciousness itself belongs to the evening.
What Metz actually wants to say is that even though cinema has shown us a lot it has at
the same time hidden a lot of things from us; for each film is a veil on the Real, a single
beam of light comes out of the projector and in the dimness of the cinematic apparatus
one is almost hypnotized, looks semi-consciously at what he is being shown.
Imagine yourself sitting in a cinema auditorium on a rather comfortable seat. This
is one of the very rare occasions when you would agree to sit quietly in the dark with a
crowd of other people. The only source of light is the projector projecting the images
onto the white wall. The white wall turns the projected light into motion pictures and you
45

Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia
Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzetti (London: Macmillan, 1982),
136-7
89

are looking at the pictures in wonderment. On your comfortable seat you are relaxed,
passive, and your ability to move is restricted by an external force. This condition of
yours is very similar to the condition of a half-asleep person between reality and the
dream world. Watching a movie is like a passage from being awake to being asleep. As a
spectator you are aware that what you are watching is not real and still you make yourself
believe that it is not totally fictional. Watching a movie you are like someone who is just
about to wake up or just about to fall asleep.
The dream materials are visual and audio images, just like the matter of cinema.
Nevertheless, there are three fundamental and semiological differences between dreams
and films. In The Imaginary Signifier Christian Metz distinguishes these three differences
between dream and film as follows:
[]first, the unequal knowledge of the subject with respect
to what he is doing; second, the presence or absence of real
perceptual material; and third, a characteristic of the textual
content itself(text of the film or dream), about which we are
now going to speak.46
All of these differences are linked to the degree of wakefulness of the subject. In
sleep there is total illusion, the subject may play a role in the dreams text. But in cinema
the subject cannot see itself on the screen, unless, of course, he is an actor or an actress
who has taken part in the film. In cinema there is a sense of reality which puts a distance
between yourself and what you see. When you are awake you are to a certain extent
aware of the fact that what you are watching is fictional.

46

Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia
Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzetti (London: Macmillan, 1982),
120
90

The second difference which Metz points out is concerned with the existence of
the matter of perception. The cinematographic image is a real image, an image that is of a
material: visual, audio. But in dreaming there is no matter of the dream, dream material is
completely illusory, it doesnt exist as an external object.
The third difference involves the textual content of the film itself. Compared to a
dream the fictional film is much more logical. If we keep the likes of David Lynch
movies apart the plot of the film mostly develops with a certain order conforming to the
expectations of the spectator. But in dreams there is no plot for no one is telling anything
to another person. The dream belongs nowhere.
After distinguishing these differences between cinema and dream Metz introduces
another term. This is what Freud called Tagtarum, or the daydream, a conscious
fantasy.47 The daydream is closer to film in that there is a certain degree of consciousness
operating within the subject when he/she is daydreaming, or fantasizing. Daydreams too,
are experienced when one is awake. The reason why film has a logical structure is that
the actors, directors, and spectators are all awake. Making and watching a film involves
conscious, pre-conscious, and sub-conscious psychic processes. Fantasizing also involves
these three psychic processes, and yet since a film is produced by conscious choices, it
has a certain purpose, a certain meaning to convey; what it will become is planned
beforehand, its every detail is written down. But fantasizing is a totally psychic process
which has gaps and disconnections in it. When we are fantasizing our intention is not to
convey a certain meaning to another person. In both processes Metz sees at work a kind
of voluntary simulation. Both the daydreamer and the film spectator know that what they
are seeing or imagining is not real; but they still make themselves believe that the case is
the opposite.
47

Metz, 43-9
91

Both the film spectator and the daydreamer replace the reality principle with the
pleasure principle. In both cases there is a willed belief in an illusion that what one is
seeing or imagining is actually taking place. Without this belief the subject cannot take
any pleasure in fantasizing and watching a film. The sole purpose of these activities is to
compensate for an unsatisfying reality. Fantasies and films are the supports of social
reality, with them the Real is kept at bay, and the gap between the subject and
nothingness is maintained. Nothingness is internal to the symbolic order. Just as the
dreaming subject is governed by the unconscious the cinema spectator and the fantasizing
subject are turning the Real into a source of pleasure, translating it into the symbolic
order. The filmmakers try to communicate directly with the unconscious of the spectator.
The unconscious is their target and they find images to match the unconscious drives. It is
precisely this matching process that forms the unconscious, for there is nothing prior to
the naming of the unconscious drives. Cinema turns the object of drives into socially
acceptable and symbolically comprehensible forms through metaphor and metonymy.
According to Lacan metaphor is a product of condensation and metonymy is a
product of displacement. The reason why these two forms of expression are so effective
is that they are closer to the workings of the unconscious than the literal. So Lacan is able
to say, the unconscious is structured a like language.
You see that by still preserving this "like" (comme), I am
staying within the bounds of what I put forward when I say
that the unconscious is structured like a language. I say like
so as not to say-and I come back to this all the time-that the
unconscious is structured by a language.48
48

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and
Knowledge (New York: Norton, 1998), 48

92

In this light the concept of metaphor appears as a product of repression and

involves the replacement of an image with another image that will have a stronger effect.
Metonymy is the product of using a part of the object to stand in for the whole of it.
Metaphor and metonymy fill the gap between the unconscious and the social reality. They
are the mediators between the two worlds.
The ordinary reality we know dissolves into the proto-ontological Real of raw
flesh and replaceable mask.49 Zizek is referring to a film, Face/Off, starring John
Travolta and Nicholas Cage. In this film Travolta and Cage find themselves in a situation
where whatever they do they act against themselves. They have each others faces. The
message is that behind our faces there is the Real, the raw flesh, nothing to identify us as
and with ourselves. The gap between the social reality and the Real is opened and two
men find themselves playing the role of their enemy. The face becomes the mask veiling
the Real. What we have here, is rather than the mask being a metaphor standing in for the
Real, is the face as a metonymy standing in for the Real.
Before this unveiling of a lack (we are already close to the cinema
signifier), the child, in order to avoid too strong an anxiety, will
have to double its belief (another cinematic characteristic) and
from then on forever hold two contradictory opinions (proof that in
spite of everything the real perception has not been without
effect).50
In some movies the failure to keep apart two contradictory positions is itself the
cause of these movies good effect. A process through which the ordinary reality
dissolves into the Real can be seen in David Lynch movies. In Mulholland Drive we have
49
50

Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 183
Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 70
93

a young actress at the beginning of her Hollywood career. The movie narrates her process
of dispersal. The imaginary, the symbolic, and the real progressively dissolve into one
another and she becomes incapable of distinguishing between what is fictional, what is in
her mind and what is social. It is only at the end of the film that we understand her real
situation, namely, that she has lost the plot of her life, and she has lost it in the fictional
world of Hollywood. To fill the space opened by this loss she becomes addicted to drugs
and alcohol, and the more drugs she takes the bigger the internal space grows, the more
the internal space grows the less she is able to make conscious choices.
3. Projective Identification and Introjection
Klein makes a distinction between introjected objects and the internal objects. The
internal objects include the introjected objects as well as the objects of identification and
the a priori fantasy images. According to Klein introjection is a defence mechanism
against the anxiety and the fear of the horrible inner world of the child. The child assumes
itself populated by bad, aggressive, and tormenting objects and attempts to introject the
external good objects. In other words the child tries to replace the internal bad object with
the external good object. So introjection is a defence mechanism to protect not only the
me but also the internal good objects.51
For Klein the unconscious fantasy sets the foundation of all psychic processes.
But Freud had said fantasizing is a defence mechanism to compensate for the frustrating
and unsatisfying reality. Klein thinks that the unconscious fantasmatic production is the
manifestation of instinctive processes. In Kleins hands the unconscious becomes a much
more active and productive dynamism in touch with whats going on in the social reality.
The importance of Kleins discovery is that she shows how intimately related the child is
51

Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1975)
94

with the social reality from the beginning of life. The child is turned towards the mother
and the unconscious moves towards consciousness in and through relating to the objects
surrounding him/her. For Klein one of the first external objects the child relates to is the
mothers breast. In the face of hunger the child starts crying for he/she has no other
means of communication. The mother understands that the child wants milk. Presented
with milk from the mothers breast the child comes to realize that there is an external
good object that is the solution to the problem of hunger. But when the flow of milk is
interrupted the child becomes confused, with the effect of hunger. The child considers the
breast as a bad object and becomes more aggressive. When the milk comes the child
realizes that he/she had been attacking not only the source of bad but also the source of
good. So the child understands that every object is good and bad at the same time, and it
is the use into which the object is put that determines its particular goodness or badness.
It is the way in which one relates to social reality that matters.
In the first year of life introjection and splitting are dominant; the child is
governed by the death drive, which is the drive that emerges as a response to the
frustration in the face of the impossibility of going back into the enclosed space and time
of the womb in which all that the organism needs is supplied without the organism having
to make any effort to obtain it.
To be able to cope with the death drive the subject projects some of his/her
aggressiveness onto the external world represented by the mother. Resultantly the child
recognizes the external world as divided within itself and populated by good and bad
objects which are not good and bad in-themselves but become good or bad in relation to
the other objects. Projective identification is another defence mechanism the child uses to
cope with the difficulties of life. With projective identification, to protect the me and the
95

internal good objects from a possible attack from the external bad object, the child
projects the internal bad objects onto the external good object. The child confuses the
external good objects, external bad objects, internal good objects, and internal bad
objects. Everything is intermingled so the child becomes aggressive towards
himself/herself and towards the external world. To cope with this difficult situation the
child projects unities onto the external world and makes no distinction between the good
and the bad. This means that the child has passed from the state of being governed by the
death drive, to the state of being governed by the life drive.
In the third stage of development there is the depressive position. With the
depressive position the child feels guilty for attacking not only the good object but also
the bad object in the paranoid-schizoid position of introjection and projective
identification. The child realizes that the loving and caring mother had been the target of
paranoid attacks all this time. To compensate for the damage caused the child strives to
make reparations to the relationship with the mother embodying the social reality. For
Klein depressive anxiety is a sign of progress.
These psychic processes go on until the end of life. The child identifies his/her
image on the mirror as himself/herself. Lacan calls Kleins depressive position the
mirror-stage.
In the Lacanian sense, too, in which the imaginary, opposed
to the symbolic but constantly imbricated with it,
designates the basic lure of the ego, the definitive imprint
of a stage before the Oedipus complex (which also
continues after it), the durable mark of the mirror which
alienates man in his own reflection and makes him the
96

double of his double, the subterranean persistence of the

exclusive relation to the mother, desire as a pure effect of
lack and endless pursuit, the initial core of the unconscious
(primal repression). All this is undoubtedly reactivated by
the play of that other mirror, the cinema screen, in this
respect a veritable psychical substitute, a prosthesis for our
primally dislocated limbs.52
In the mirror stage, a period of imaginary and narcissistic identifications, the child
believes in the illusion which he/she sees on the mirror. He/she sees himself/herself as a
totality and believes that thats what he/she really is. It is a period of conflict between the
self as the others object of desire and the self as the subject sees it. The reflection on the
mirror starts the process of introjection and projective-identification that will go on until
death.
[] the experience of the mirror as described by Lacan is
essentially situated on the side of the imaginary
(=formation of the ego by identification with a phantom, an
image), even if the mirror also makes possible a first access
to the symbolic by the mediation of the mother holding the
child to the glass whose reflection, functioning here as the
capitalized Other, necessarily appears in the field of the
mirror alongside that of the child.53
The screen is the site of projective identification. I put myself in the place of the
character and try to see the film from his perspective. In a way I narcissistically try to
52
53

Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 4

Metz, 6
97

situate myself in the context of the film as a whole person. But as soon as the screen
gains this mirror-like quality it loses it. With the screen there is a more advanced process
at work, and this process is called projective-identification, not merely identification. The
subject is aware that he is not the character in the movie, but still takes on this other
identity on himself as though he is the one experiencing all those adventures.
When I am watching a movie I become the eye of the camera. Everything
happens around me and I am a mere observer of all these things. In a way, as Im
watching a movie I become a semi-god-like creature, seeing not-all hearing not-all from a
position not above all; from a position which renders the binary opposition between the
transcendental and the immanent irrelevant. I am within and without the events and I am
at once here and somewhere else with my body and everything else. It is the eye of the
other that makes the eye of the self possible.
4. Cinema and Fetishism
Even shit has a commercial value, depending of course, on whose shit it is. While
in the case of human shit you have to pay to get rid of it, in the case of animal shit it is
said to be a very efficient and sufficient fertilizer for one who has learned to use it, rather
than seeing it as something worthless because it cannot be eaten. Inversely, it is this very
terror that is projected on to the spectacle of the mothers body, and invites the reading of
an absence where anatomy sees a different conformation.54
Since even the instincts are produced by the superpanoptic projection-introjection
mechanism in which the subject finds himself/herself, giving free rein to the unconscious
to express itself only produces projections of the evil within onto the without. For Freud
the death drive is the effect of a striving for infinity, nothingness, and death. I would say
it is also the cause of it.
54

Metz, 69
98

Commodity fetishism is equal to will to nothingness in that it is the desire for the
inorganic objects to stand in for nothingness, the Real of the subjects desire. Capitalism
replaces the use value of the objects with two-dimensional commercial value, so the
subject desires to be desired, and he/she can only do that by adapting to the two
dimensional sphere of commodity fetishism; by becoming a fetish object himself. If we
recall Marcuse complaining that the one-dimensional is absorbing the two-dimensional
and also keep in mind that Marcuses two-dimensional culture has become the predominant culture of today, we can see why the solution is to say, I dont see myself as
you see me, to the big Other in whatever form it appears in our lives.
In our opinion fetishism only occurs in sadism in a
secondary and distorted sense. It is divested of its essential
relation to disavowal and suspense and passes into the
totally different context of negativity and negation, where it
becomes an agent in the sadistic process of condensation.55
So the death drive produces new objects of desire by splitting the already existing
objects. The subject as death drive, by splitting the symbolic, opens up spaces for the
emergence of new objects of desire to stand in for nothingness and death.
The good object has moved to the side of knowledge and
the cinema becomes a bad object (a dual displacement
which makes it easy for science to stand back). The
cinema is persecuted, but this persistence is also a
reparation (the knowing posture is both aggressive and
depressive), reparation of a specific kind, peculiar to the
semiologist: the restoration to the theoretical body of what
55

Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1989), 32
99

has been taken from the institution, from the code which is
being studied.56
Writing about cinema is essentially a criticism of the symbolic order, for both
writing and cinematic production are themselves symbolic social activities. Since cinema
exploits the life drive by satisfying the desire for something covering nothing, writing
about cinema is essentially governed by the death drive which tries to expose the
nothingness behind the symbolic. That which a film veils is nothing other than nothing;
and exposing this nothingness behind the film introduces a split between the subject and
the signifier. When looked at like that psychotherapy becomes critical of the existing
social order, for by criticizing the film the critic heals the film industry hence having a
healing effect on the spectator.
It is clear that fetishism, in the cinema as elsewhere, is closely
linked to the good object. The function of the fetish is to restore the
latter, threatened in its goodness (in Melanie Kleins sense) by the
terrifying discovery of the lack. Thanks to the fetish, which covers
the wound and itself becomes erotogenic, the object as a whole can
become desirable again without excessive fear.57
According to Metz cinema is a fetish object. Films stand in for an object that is
absent. The reflection of images on the screen veil the nothingness behind them without
which they would not have been seen. The fetish is the cinema in its physical state. A
fetish is always material: insofar as one can make up for it by the power of the symbolic
alone one is precisely no longer a fetishist.58

56

Metz, 80
Metz, 75
58
Metz, 75
57

100

Cinema produces unattainable objects of desire. By filling in a gap they render the
nothingness more unattainable. They give the impression that there is something they are
hiding and that way they produce the desire for nothingness. Cinemas power of
exploiting the will to nothingness, however, is the only tool one has at hand to criticize
the cinematic apparatus as a form of ideology.
Sublimation of the objects of desire takes place through cinema and television.
The more they are rendered unattainable the more sublime they become. What cinema
does is to create the illusion of presence. Cinema shows an absent object through
presenting an object to substitute for the nothingness. So it is the presence of an absence
that we see on the screen. To enjoy cinema the subject has to know that what he/she is
watching is only a presence covering an absence, that it is that which stands in for the
Real of the subjects desire. So Metz can say, the fetish is the cinema in its physical
sense.59 Looked at that way fetish is that which is produced to stand in for the Real
object of desire, which is nothingness, and is therefore produced to satisfy the will to
nothingness.
Cinematic narrative doesnt show events in their real sequence. There are cuts,
gaps, spaces between the scenes. All those, cuts, gaps, spaces between the scenes are
openings to an external reality; they give the impression that there is something external
to that which is actually being shown. The spectator is made to believe that there is
something he/she doesnt know as to whats really going on in the film. This curiosity for
that which is unknown inherent in every human is that which cinema exploits. By making
the spectator simultaneously believe and not-believe what he/she is seeing on the screen,
cinema creates an ambiguous relationship with itself and the spectator.

59

Metz, 75
101

By leaving gaps within the narrative, cinema invites projective identification. The
spectator projects what he has inside him onto the absence within the filmic text. He fills
those gaps with his internal partial objects and imposes a unity and continuity on the split
narrative of the film.
The death drive involves splitting and introjection. The subject as death drive
splits given unities and continuities. It is impossible for a spectator governed by the death
drive to identify with the characters in the film. On the contrary, he desires nothing,
identifies with nothing, without which he knows there can be no meaning. Rather than
filling in the gaps within the narrative death drive puts them into the spotlight, it shows
that those gaps are interior to the narrative itself. The incompleteness of the narrative is
the condition of possibility for its meaning.
We can differentiate these two different types of spectatorship, one governed by
the life drive and the other by the death drive, as associationism and dissociationsim.
In associationism the subject immerses himself/herself in the medium of the
imaginary and identifies with the characters in the movie. In dissociationsim the subject
introduces new splits between the internal and the external objects and hence renders
identification impossible for himself/herself.
The life drive is the will to become one with the world, it is the force behind
mimicry and associationsim. It is wrong to associate the death drive with mimicry and
associationism. The subject as death drive dissociates and splits given unities and
continuities. In horror movies the absence of the knowledge of truth for the spectator, that
is, not being given the role of the omniscient eye, the spectator becomes curious and to
understand whats really going on in the movie he/she identifies with the characters. In
the face of the abundance of gaps to be filled in the process of watching the film the life
102

drive grows less and less strong for doing all the job throughout the watching process,
while the death drive is oppressed and because of this very oppression it grows more and
more strong. Eventually the life drive collapses and the death drive overflows the
auditorium.
Although it is itself a product of the death drive, horror film exploits the life drive,
that is, the spectators will to form unities, bind the action, desire to get rid of all gaps and
inconsistencies within the narrative. The death drive negates negation and reaches the
highest possible degree of affirmation. Thanatos wills nothing, whereas Eros wills
nothingness. We can see that the Thanatos case is the reverse of what Nietzsche says,
man would much rather will nothingness than not will. Eros wants to want nothing; and
strives to form such unities that everything will fit in its place; the system will lack
nothing, so Eros will want nothing. Thanatos introduces splits, and tries to reach the
nothingness behind the symbolic. Thanatos wants nothing rather than nothingness. He
wants nothing to show the nothingness in the midst of everything, that there is nothing
behind all that there is.
While Eros wants to lack nothing, wants the lack of lack, Thanatos affirms life as
it is and wants lack, wants something to lack, wants that lack to remain after all is said
and done, so that he can desire the nothingness which that lack presents. Thanatos doesnt
want something to replace nothing, but rather wants the lack in everything. By negating
negation the death drive affirms life as it is, that is, in its incompleteness, and with
nothingness and death in its midst.

103

5. Butterfly Effect
The main character in the Butterfly Effect seizes hold of a memory as it flashes
up at a moment of danger.60 Butterfly Effect is a film from 2004 directed by Eric Bress
and J. Mackye Gruber, in which Chaos Theory is applied to history and psychoanalysis.
According to Chaos Theory an event which seems to be very insignificant in a sequence
of events is in fact as important as any other event and the effects of a minor cause
require some time to manifest themselves in relation to the macro situation.
With the Butterfly Effect the audience sees everything from the perspective of a
young man who not only has flashbacks in the form of dreams, but who is also able to
travel in time through reading his journals. As he reads the journal, first the words, then
himself, and finally the whole room starts shaking and immediately after this falling into
pieces of the scene the subject travels in time, or perhaps only in his personal history, and
wakes up at another period of his own life. His aim is to change something so crucial to
the present but which has taken place in the past, and so that way make some things a
little bit better for the people surrounding him. But to be able to be present in the past he
has to occupy the place of his presence in that particular slice of the past. That is why, as
a child he has occasional blackouts during which disastrous things happen, such as a
mother with her baby in her arms being blown up. His gift of travelling in time turns out
to be his curse locking him up in a mental hospital as a hopeless case who believes he has
journals through the reading of which he can go back and forth in time and put things
right or wrong when in fact there are no journals and he has simply made all these things
up in his mind. Each time he goes back in time to fix something bad, he causes something
worse to happen. But that worse thing which happens takes place because of his
60

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, ed. Hannah

Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1973), 257
104

intervention in the first place. Caught in this vicious cycle of a self-fulfilling prophecy he
finally strikes the right chord, he goes back to the right time and fixes the right thing.
Where he goes is not in the journals this time, for he is in the mental hospital, in a time
where his journals do not exist or are not recognized as such. This time he goes back in
time through an amateur home movie recorded when he and his girlfriend were kids, that
is, before the girl makes the decision to stay with her father rather than her mother who
moves to another city after their divorce. Her decision to stay with her father leads to her
friendship with the boy and to the eventual disasters. In this time they are at a garden
party. When the girl approaches him he says, If you come near me again Ill destroy you
and your family. And the little girl runs and hides behind her mother. What he is actually
doing there is giving a voice to the evil at the right time, hence causing less worse things
to happen in the future. Bringing out that repressed and anti-social behaviour at the right
time, or situating this free floating sign beneath the social reality, turns out to be less evil
than the most good of society. It is all a matter of situating the act in the right time and
the right place.
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the
way it really was (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as
it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes
to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man
singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects
both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat
hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In
every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away
from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah
105

comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of

Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the
spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the
dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy
has not ceased to be victorious.61
Intervention in history, seeing in the past something which has never taken place,
is itself an act opening up spaces for new possibilities to emerge. The fear of serving that
which one thinks one is struggling against prepares the grounds for the realization of
what the subject was afraid of.
A potential for change that has never initiated actual change cannot be a lost
chance for a change. For since it has never taken place it cannot be a lost possibility.
Benjamins point when he says, only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark
of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the
enemy if he wins, is that even the dead will not be safe unless the enemy loses. How
can even the dead not be safe? For when the enemy loses the lives of the dead will have
been wasted for nothing, for these now dead people will have struggled and suffered for
nothing. For then, not the enemy but we, the friends of those who died for a good cause
will have written the history. For Benjamin its all a matter of who represents what
happened.
The spark of hope that is to be fanned is not the hope of redemption, but the
hope that redemption has already taken place. That we are already redeemed and yet it is
precisely this state of being redeemed that makes it a forced-choice and yet a
responsibility to tell the story of the past in such a way as to introduce a split between the
61

Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1973), 257

106

past and the future which generates a new mode of being and initiates change. It is out of
the space between the past and the future, or the subject of statement and the subject of
enunciation, that something new emerges ex nihilo. The subject writes its difference from
itself, all writing is writing the difference of the subject from the void. And yet since the
void against which the subject writes is the subject itself, with each word the subject
moves further away from itself. This performative contradiction inherent in language is
the way things are in the world. The outside, the unconscious, is the shadow of language
and the social reality.
6. The Island: Waiting for a day that will never come
The Island is a science-fiction movie directed by Michael Bay. Our hero, Lincoln
Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) wakes up from a nightmare in which he sees himself
drowning. What we, the spectators dont know yet is that Lincoln has actually woken up
to a sterile world which has nothing do with the real world. Lincoln wakes up from a
nightmare to what appears to be an unreal reality. As Lincoln wakes up he sees a screen
in front of him on which is written Erratic REM Sleep Cycle Detected, followed by
Please Report to Tranquility Center. Lincoln gets out of his bed and goes to the toilet.
As he urinates, another screen appears in front of him with the words Sodium Excess
Detected, Advising Nutritional Control. On top of all these a speaker intervenes: A
healthy person is a happy person.
Lincoln is living in an environment in which he is surveilled and controlled at all
times. This environment is in fact an underground factory which produces human clones.
Lincoln is nothing but a clone produced to be consumed when the time comes. We, the
spectators, will later on learn that this environment was an institution used by the
American Ministry of Defence for military research. Now it has been passed on to a
107

medical corporation sponsored by extremely rich people to produce clones. These clones
are the copies of those rich people who have various illnesses. Lincoln Six-Echo, for
instance, is the clone of a Scottish man named Tom Lincoln who suffers from Hepatitis
and who is expected to die in two years. This means that in two years time Lincoln SixEcho will be killed and his organs will be transferred to his sponsor Tom Lincoln.
The DNA samples taken from the sponsors are used to produce clones. These
clones are then grown in a womb-like environment until they reach the age of their
sponsors. Some of the clones are grown for their hearts, some for their eyes, skins, and
some for their internal organs. As they are grown they are almost injected a memory
through audio-visual imagery, their consciousness is completely artificial just like
themselves. Although they look no different from a normal human being they are in fact
programmed to desire to go to The Island. They are continually told that they are the
chosen ones, that they are the only survivors from a terrible epidemic which destroyed
almost all life on earth, that they are lucky for being where they now are. Of course these
clones need some kind of motive to be able to bear their monotonous existence. Their
motive is waiting for the day on which they will win the lottery and go to the last piece of
beauty left on earth after the epidemic; an exotic island, a heaven on earth. Through this
lottery business the life in this institution is invested with a meaning. Educated to the
level of fifteen year old children, the clones do not question their lives. They think that
they really are chosen and they really want to go to the island. But Lincoln is unhappy
and unsatisfied. He thinks there should be more to life than waiting for the departure
towards the island. When he talks with his psychiatrist who is in fact the manager of the
corporation, his psychiatrist tells him this: You cant see how lucky you are Lincoln.
You have survived the epidemic, you are comfortable here, what else do you want?
108

Lincoln is not satisfied with this answer and goes to places he shouldnt, sees things he
better not. Following an insect Lincoln finds himself at a hidden section of the institute, a
hospital, where he sees that those who are chosen to go to the island are in fact killed for
their organs. Lincoln understands that there is no such thing as an epidemic, and no such
place as the island, that all this island business is merely a fantasy to keep the clones
operating efficiently as they wait.
On the night of the day that Lincoln learns the truth his lover Jordan Two-Delta
(Scarlet Johansson) wins the lottery. Realising that the turn of death has come to Jordan,
Lincoln goes to her room to warn her. After that the movie turns into a typical adventure
movie in which many cars explode and many people die. At the end our hero and heroine
destroy the corporation and save all the clones from their miserable existences.
The importance of this movie derives from the way in which it criticizes modern
power structures which produces subjects in such a way as to serve the system which
consumes them. The subjects are subjectified so as to feel happy and content with being
locked in hopeful dreams. The Island shows that even what we call the unconscious is a
construct, that the drives are not natural, but rather cultural products.
What we see here is how the life drive turns out to be the death drive. As the
clones wait for the day they will finally start living a real life full of pleasures, they are in
fact waiting for the day they will die. As they die the system in which they are locked
gains strength. Through the death of the subjects the system prolongs its own life.

109

Intermediation 2
In the previous chapter I attempted to analyze the cinematic apparatus in relation
to psychoanalysis. Although I havent mentioned his name, Deleuzes influence was
pervasive in the previous chapter. Already in Difference and Repetition Deleuze
understands the brain as a screen. To my mind Deleuzes understanding of the brain as a
screen is rooted in his recreation of the concept of the death drive in Difference and
Repetition. His argument against the representational mode of being is actually an attack
on the transcendence oriented conceptualizations of Freuds drive theory. Deleuzes
corpus can also be read as an enquiry into the relationship between unconscious drives
and conscious desires. In this context fidelity in Deleuzean philosophy requires a reconceptualization of the brain not only as a screen, but also as a projector.
I think the cinematic apparatus stimulates not only the conscious mind, but also
the unconscious drives, hence producing not only consciousness, but also the
unconscious. I agree with Deleuze that the unconscious is productive of desire, but what I
think to be missing in Deleuze is that the unconscious itself is always already produced
by external forces such as cinema, media, and television. So the desire produced by the
unconscious is always already adaptive to the predominant form of desiring which serves
the reproduction of the predominant order of things.
In the next chapter I shall attempt to provide a detailed analysis of Cronenbergs
movies in relation to the concepts of projective identification, introjection, creativity and
destructivity.

110

CHAPTER IV: Cronenberg, Burroughs, Deleuze

1. Passing Across The Dead Zone and Moving Towards The Dread Zone
It is early 1974, in Washington, Richard Nixon was being pressed slowly into a
corner, wrapped in a snarl of magnetic tapes. [] In Room 619 of the Eastern Maine
Medical Center, Johnny Smith still slept. He had begun to pull into a fetal shape.62
In Stephen Kings novel The Dead Zone, adapted to cinema by David
Cronenberg, the main character Johnny Smith stays in a coma for five years. He wakes up
to a cold winter to find himself with a limp, and separated from his girlfriend. Johnny
starts to see evil everywhere; he reads the consequences of the evil thoughts in peoples
minds across time. A sense for evil, together with an ability to see the past, the present
and the future, means it becomes impossible for Johnny to bear the burden of being in the
world. He comes to realize that what he thought was an extraordinary psychic power is in
fact an evil curse which makes life inordinately painful. Willing to escape from this
unbearable situation that is turning him into the playground of good and evil, he falls
deeper into the trap of a monstrous man, Gregg Stillson, the embodiment of evil in the
world, who finds out Johnnys secret and wants to abuse it. Johnny takes the wrong turn,
because he didnt know that the dreadful had already happened. Directed by the
monstrous man he wills nothingness rather than not will, and dies a tragic death at the
end.
Little by little this brawny young dock-walloper had severed his
connections with the world, wasting away, losing his hair, optic
nerves degenerating into oatmeal behind his closed eyes, body
62

Stephen King, The Dead Zone, (London: TimeWarner, 1979),100

111

gradually drawing up into a fetal position as his ligaments

shortened. He had reversed time, had become a fetus again,
swimming in the placental waters of coma as his brain
degenerated. An autopsy following his death had shown that the
folds and convolutions of his cerebrum had smoothed out, leaving
the frontal and prefrontal lobes almost utterly smooth and blank. 63
Johnnys rearrival, his return from the unconscious to the conscious state, from
the land of the dead to the world of the living, with extraordinary psychic powers, a sense
of omnipotence which turns out to be the source of death, is described by King in terms
of a rebirth, a coming out of the womb after the second (nearer) death experience.
Johnny Smith is at first almost exactly the opposite of a clinical and criminal
psychotic. Johnny does not identify, he refuses to believe in other worldly things, there is
no struggle between good and evil in his world, in his world there is no evil, no third
party. In Johnnys world there is only him, Sarah, and their eternal love. Living in an
illusory heaven, Johnny is unaware of the dangers surrounding him, but in Kings world
the evil shall surely show his multiple faces to scare the hell out of those people.
After the tragic and yet banal accident Johnny becomes a clinical but not a
criminal psychotic. Johnny identifies himself with Jesus, he refuses to believe in the
world as it is, there begins a constant struggle between good and evil in his mind. He has
lost Sarah and their eternal love, and the evil forces surrounding their earlier happiness
prevail. Johnnys illusory heaven becomes an illusory hell. As usually happens in Kings
world the evil shows his multiple faces and scares the hell out of the reader.

63

King, 82
112

Kings novels are cathartic in a very Aristotelian sense of the word. And yet its
precisely this cathartic effect disguised as subversive and critical of the established order
that reproduces the order and produces psychotic replicas. King is a very unique example
of how monstrous a unification of the therapeutic and the critical can be. There are two
traumatic incidents leaving their traces on his life as Johnny goes along the way towards
death. In this novel which is difficult to categorize as horror unless that is what horror
actually is, Johnny Smith finds himself in an unbearable situation that sends him to an
early grave. What seems to him to be a gift of life turns out to be a gift of death. Johnny is
cursed by a second sight after two banal accidents, one in early childhood, one in
adolescence, which submit him to the domination of the power of his wounds. And
with the already there circumstances, that is, a society dying to believe in the power of
the wound, apocalypse, return of the living dead, transcendental experiences and
so on, Johnny becomes a tragic, Christ-like hero who feels compelled to sacrifice himself
for the deliverance of salvation to the people. His mother sees it as an occasion for
celebration that Johnny is mortally wounded when they tell her that he is in a coma: God
has put his mark on my Johnny and I rejoice.64
Choose, something inside whispered. Choose or theyll choose for
you, theyll rip you out of this place, whatever and wherever it is,
like doctors ripping a baby out of its mothers womb by cesarian
section.65
And in accordance with the demands of his inner voice, Johnny Smith, in The
Dead Zone, chooses resurrection. After five years of deep coma Johnny wakes up to a
nightmare and finds himself as the one whose destiny it has become after two banal
64

King, The Dead Zone, 71

King, 111

65

113

accidents of life to set things right and prevent heavens becoming hell. King knows that
the readers assumption is that there is something inside to be protected from the external
threats. The desire of the reader is the desire of the threat as external rather than internal
to the self. King satisfies the readers desire by giving him/her the most beloved son
Johnny as the gift: the gift of death as Derrida would have put it. Johnny fulfils the
readers desire not only for an external threat but also for a saviour hero from within, one
of us. Johnny emerges from his coma as the embodiment of the Christ-like figure,
Kings son, whose mission it is to die and preserve the heaven-like qualities of this small
American town in particular, and the universe in general.
Upon his return to the symbolic order, from the unconscious state of coma,
Johnny finds himself surrounded by people who are trying to exploit his extraordinary
psychic powers, confronted with what Freud, in On Narcissism, calls hallucinatory
wishful psychosis on a social level. Its as though the whole society is in the grip of a
paralysis and through their collective hallucination they cling to life. And Johnny
becomes not only the thread tying them to their illusions, but also the one who preserves
those illusions by sacrificing himself. Since this aspect of Johnnys melodramatic story is
more precisely expressed in David Cronenbergs adaptation of the novel, I now turn to
Cronenbergs film.
Cronenberg emphasizes that Greg Stillson is the man who is the manipulator, the
one who creates and sells illusionary images of himself. In Cronenbergs film Johnnys
visions are placed directly in opposition to Stillsons fantastic images of self. Towards the
end of the film, Johnny, no more able to stand the half-dead life he is living in isolation,
decides to put his visions to a good use. He attends one of Stillsons campaigns and
shakes Stillsons hand to see into him. What Johnny sees is Stillson as the evil president
114

of the future, who has the fate of the whole world in his control. Johnny sees him
pressing the button of a nuclear bomb behind closed doors. Finally Johnny makes up his
mind and at a later Stillson campaign, this time in a church, attempts to assassinate
Stillson. Sarah is there with her baby, and she notices Johnny just as he is about to pull
the trigger. Distracted by Sarahs cry, Johnny misses the target. Stillson takes Sarahs
baby and holds it up as a shield against Johnnys bullets. Meanwhile Johnny is being shot
by Stillsons guards. A photographer takes Stillsons picture while he is using the baby as
a shield and this picture becomes the front cover of the Time magazine, not only ending
Stillsons career as a politician but also leading him to suicide.
In the film the atmosphere is extremely melancholic. Johnny is portrayed as a
much more repressed, melodramatic individual who at the same time has a romantic
vision of life. The traumatic incident, the time he spends in the dead zone, magnifies his
will to transcend his body which he sees as a source of agony. He pushes himself further
towards isolation to escape from the increasingly sharpening visions. Remember that
Johnny sees in the past, present, and future of other people through touching them.
Touching another person is a cause of pain for Johnny. As his visions sharpen and turn
into sources of pain he moves away from intersubjectivity and towards introversion. It is
one of the characteristics of Romanticism to consider trauma, suffering, pain, disaster as
possibilities of transcending the flesh. In Cronenbergs romanticism turned against
itself we see exactly the opposite. In Cronenberg after the traumatic incident it is a
regressive process that starts taking its course, rather than a progressive movement
towards eternal bliss. The problem with Cronenbergs inversion of romanticism is that he
still sees the movement towards eternal bliss, towards jouissance as progressive; the

115

difference between the classical romanticism and Cronenbergs inverted neo-romanticism

is that Cronenberg considers that progress to be impossible.
It is at the sight of their condition, upon the realization of the situation they are
caught in, that Cronenbergs characters recoil in horror. And it is at the sight of this that
Cronenberg expects the spectator to recoil in horror in a fashion similar to his characters.
2. Narcissus Revisited
Narcissus can see his other only through an image of himself. In Narcissus the
governor of the self is interior to the self. There is projection and introjection but not
identification in Narcissus. However, this is not enough to save Narcissus from an early
death. As soon as he identifies himself as his own object of love he kills himself.
Narcissus is a-social and at the same time he is afraid of seeing the world through eyes
that see the world before identification; he cannot see his eye prior to its reflection on the
water. Although he sees not through an external authority, the internal authority thinks
itself to be the only authority, becomes an introjection of an absent external authority and
eventually takes the place of the external authority. Narcissus should learn to see himself
and others as they are before identification, before individuation, before personalization,
before the guilt, before the vision of existence created by the absent presence of a
panoptic eye. He has to retain sanity in the face of the tragedy that he has been the subject
and the object of his desire at once all this time. Narcissus fails in doing this and dies an
untimely death.
Narcissus cannot stand the thought that the subject and the object are one. And
instead of directing his death drive against this unity of the subject and the object he
directs it against himself and dies. This death, however, is a product of the nothingness
that Narcissus wills, rather than being an outcome of his preferring not to will at all.
116

3. The Mantle Twins

With Dead Ringers (1988) Cronenberg shows the consequences of an attempt to
get rid of the space between the me and the not me. The illusory absence of difference
between Mantle twins Beverly and Elliot is their own creation. They identify with one
another so much that they think they are one split soul living one life in two different
bodies. When they are discussing the deteriorating condition of Beverly, Claire says to
Elliot that he shouldnt identify with Beverly, distance himself from him, and live his
own life separate from Beverly. In response to Claires suggestion Elliot says, But the
drugs he takes are running in my veins. Beverly and Elliot are twice split. They are not
only split from their mother by birth, but also from one another. They are divided within
and against themselves. Let us start from the beginning to make more sense of what
happens in Dead Ringers.
Right at the beginning of the film we see Beverly and Elliot, in childhood, talking
about the difference between the copulation of fish and humans. One of them suggests
that fish are able to reproduce without having sex, and that if humans were living under
the water they wouldnt need to have sex to copulate. They would simply internalise the
water through which they would copulate. At the prospect of copulation without
touching, the other twin responds by saying, I like the idea. The next scene shows
Beverly and Elliot approaching a girl and asking her if she wanted to have sex with them
in a bathtub as an experiment. They are aggressively rejected and accused of talking dirty.
From the very beginning Beverly and Elliot see science as a means to attain sex
objects and sex objects as means to carry out their scientific projects. A further hint at
117

their tendency to see the female body as something to be experimented upon is given in
the following scene where they are seen operating on a plastic doll pinned down on the
table. This is their play. For them the object of desire is at the same time the object of
science, and science is a form of play. Their diagnosis concerning the patient is intra
ovular surgery.
From the year 1954 we shift to the year 1967. Beverly and Elliot are in the faculty
of medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We see them applying their surgical
instrument, their own invention, on a cadaver in the autopsy room. In stark contrast to the
professors negative attitude towards their radical new instrument, the next scene shows
Elliot receiving a gold plate model of their instrument as a prize for their contribution to
gynaecology. At home Beverly is working on their future contributions to the field.
The differences between Beverly and Elliot become more obvious with the entry
of Claire to their life. Beverly comes to understand that he is different from his brother
through his different way of being in relation to Claire. While Elliot sees Claire as merely
an object of play (sex and science), rather than as another person, Beverly is more
affectionate and wants to sincerely engage in a profound interaction with Claire. And yet
Claires sexual identity, that is, her masochistic tendency to occupy a passive and
submissive position in the relationship makes it impossible for Beverly to escape from
the double bind situation he finds himself in. The whole film is a narrative of how one
falls into a double bind situation and why it is impossible to escape from this double bind
without having to die.
In Dead Ringers the Mantle twins are locked in the mirror stage. Death emerges
as the only way to escape from this entrapment in an endlessly self-perpetuating process
of projective identification. Their minoritarian nature, having been born identical twins,
118

leads them to study the womb as the monster that gave birth to them. The Mantle twins
fascination with deformed wombs, and the instruments they invent to act upon those
deformations reflect their deviant relation to birth, motherhood, and sexuality.
At the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to
recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and
in the anxiety of the individual confronting the concentrational
form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort,
existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the
subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom
that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a
prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a
pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic
idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself
only in suicide; a consciousness of the other than can be satisfied
only by Hegelian murder.66
In the relationship between Beverly and Elliot, the other consciousness is at the
same time the consciousness of the self. Beverly and Elliot think that they are the same
and yet different from one another at the same time. An impossible situation is situated in
the context of gynaecology and the psychic life of a male gynaecologists relation to a
female patient is used to show what happens when art-sex-science become one. The
voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of sexual relation Lacan is talking about is precisely
the Mantle twins relation to the female body and sex. Because they see themselves as a
deviation from the norm, they see their mother as the birth giver of an abnormality. Their
66

Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977), 7
119

fascination with the ill-formed female body thus gains a significance in terms of their
relation to their mother and birth.
The very existence of imagination means that you can posit an
existence different from the one youre living. If you are trying to
create a repressive society in which people will submit to whatever
you give them, then the very fact of them being able to imagine
something elsenot necessarily better, just differentis a threat.
So even on that very simple level, imagination is dangerous. If you
accept, at least to some extent, the Freudian dictum that civilization
is repression, then imaginationand an unrepressed creativityis
dangerous to civilization. But its a complex formula; imagination
is also an innate part of civilization. If you destroy it, you might
also destroy civilization.67
Cronenberg is a much more Freudian director than he would dare to admit.
Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the
dwelling-house was a substitute for the mothers womb, the first
lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he
was safe and felt at ease.68
Freud says that reality and fantasy, external and internal, the self and the world,
the psychic and the material are in conflict and that this conflict is always experienced as
pain. To compensate for the pain of this fragmentary existence man writes and tries to
form a unity which he believes to have once been present and after which he is destined
67

David Cronenberg, Croneberg on Cronenberg, ed. Chris Rodley (London; Faber and
Faber, 191992), 169
68
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (London:
Penguin, 1985), 279
120

to strive. In Freuds vision the subject is always in pursuit of an unattainable sense of

wholeness, what he calls the oceanic feeling. And yet, Freud says, the subject can turn
this negative situation into a positive one by creating works of art and literature in the
way of producing at-one-ment with the world, although for Freud, this at-one-ment is
impossible to attain, and if literature has any therapeutic effect at all, it is only to the
extent of turning indescribable misery into ordinary unhappiness. Freud says, the
substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality, but they
are none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in
mental life.69
Freuds idea that imagination in general and writing in particular is a desperate
attempt to return to the womb, to the state of being before birth, is clearly manifest in
Dead Ringers. In the womb Beverly/Elliot was one and their choice of profession is a
sign of their striving for that long lost oneness within themselves, with each other, and
with their mother. What Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, calls the oceanic
feeling, that is, the security of existence within the womb, tied to the mother with the
umbilical cord, and swimming in the placental waters in foetal shape without the danger
of drowning, is what the Mantle twins are striving for. According to Cronenberg they
wish they were fish. Cronenberg sees barbaric regress as an inevitable consequence of
progress.
This gives us our indication for therapeutic procedure to afford
opportunity for formless experience, and for creative impulses,
motor and sensory, which are the stuff of playing. And on the basis
of playing is built the whole of mans experiential existence. No
longer are we either introvert or extrovert. We experience life in
69

Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 262

121

the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of

subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is
intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the
shared reality of the world that is external to individuals.70
Freuds and Winnicotts methods of therapy are based on the pursuit of a lacking
sense of unity of self and the world. This form of therapeutic procedure forces the subject
to ego formation, normalization, and submissiveness to the existing order of meaning.
Freud considers the state of being in harmony with the world as the sign of health and
development of the capacity to repress the drives and making sharp distinctions between
the internal and external worlds, and between the conscious and the unconscious mind as
a sign of progress. Although Winnicott, like Freud, assumes that there is an originary split
between the internal and the external worlds, he at the same time differs from Freud in
that his therapeutic process involves some kind of a journey that the therapist takes with
the patient. In this kind of therapeutic relationship the therapist engages in a spontaneous
interaction through playing with the rules of the game itself. In this process the role of the
therapist is to render the patient capable of learning to play. In turn the therapist himself
learns to relate to the patient through a kind of unconscious communication.
What we have both in the Mantle twins and Freud and Winnicott then, is a will to
transcend the material world through material tools. Mantle twins aim is to go beyond
the material world and unite with one another in a dimension where the psychic and the
material, the self and the other become one. The surgical instruments Beverly invents
after Claire goes away for two weeks, are parallel to his mental deterioration. As he turns
against himself, so do the surgical instruments turn into weapons against the patients. The
sharp and pointed instruments represent Beverlys regressive movement towards
70

Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality, (London: Tavistock, 1971), 64

122

aggressive barbarism. The Mantle Retractor is replaced by objects to dig into the body.
These instruments are a result of Beverlys attempt to externalise the illusory space
created by loss of the object of love. By digging holes he thinks he will have restored
himself. The instruments he creates eventually turn against him and his brother,
destroying both in the process.
It is a recurrent theme of Cronenberg films that what the subject himself created
turns against the subject and becomes the very cause of the subjects death. In
Videodrome (1982) for instance we see Max, the victim of a video program which is
inserted into the subjects body and possessed, the subject acts unconsciously in the
service of the monstrous forces behind the screen. All Videodrome tapes do is to bring out
whats already in the subject. That is, make the subjects unconscious fantasies appear on
the surface of the screen. In other words it turns the subject into a projection-introjection
mechanism. At the end of the movie we see Maxs hand turning into the gun he was
holding. He is seeing himself on the screen killing himself, and in the next scene he is
killing himself in front of the screen onto which he had already projected the scenario of
his own death. He introjects what he himself projects, and what he projects is already an
effect of what he had introjected. What we have here is a deconstruction of the
relationship between the screen and the mirror. Not only the screen is a mirror, but also
the mirror is a screen. The Videodrome tapes are the partial-objects which when united
through the subjects body, take over the body and manifest themselves in the actions of
the subject. The subject becomes, in a way, an object of violence against itself and others.
4. Consequences of Messing With Nature
With the aim of changing the past, an impossible thing to do, the subject messes
with nature, and his intrusion causes the very event which he was trying to prevent from
123

happening. Just like Oedipuss father who, in escape from a prophecy, falls victim to his
choice of way to escape, and becomes the victim of his own choice. And his choice is, in
the first place, to believe in the prophecy. It is as soon as he puts his belief into action that
he prepares the grounds of his subjection to an external force. His own construct, that
external force, governs his actions independently of his intentions. There still is a
governor but this governor is an internally constituted external force.
What Lacan calls the unconscious is the dead zone in-between the subject and the
signifier. Or the state of non-being in the space between the state of being governed by
drives and the entry into the symbolic order. The unconscious understood as the dead
zone in between the subject and language, is at the same time the gap between being and
becoming. Entry into the symbolic is associated with a passage from the state of being,
through non-being and into the symbolic order of becoming.
Melanie Klein takes the beginning of becoming to as early as the first months of
life. In her analysis of the Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict and of Super-ego
Formation, Klein looks for the causes of aggression and sadistic impulses in the normal
development of the child.
The child also has phantasies in which his parents destroy
each other by means of their genitals and excrements which
are felt to be dangerous weapons. These phantasies have
important effects and are very numerous, containing such
ideas as that the penis is, incorporated in the mother, turns
into a dangerous animal or into weapons loaded with
explosive substances; or that her vagina, too, is transformed
into a dangerous animal or some instrument of death, as,
124

for instance, a poisoned mouse-trap. Since such phantasies

are wish phantasies, the child has a sense of guilt about the
injuries which, in his phantasy, his parents inflict on each
other.71
Absence of the feeling of guilt causes the sadistic impulse to dominate the child.
The external world is considered to be dangerous and the child attacks the mother whom
he believes to contain the fathers penis. As he is attacking the mother the child is in fact
attacking the father. Formation of the super-ego, or entry into the symbolic requires the
acceptance of loss of innocence, purity, security, omniscience and recognition of ones
own guilt. The importance of what Klein is saying here lies in her realization that there is
more evil and less evil, but there is no absolute good and evil. We are all, in a way, mad,
but some are more so than the others. According to Klein, most subjects experience a
certain neurosis during normal development, but in some children the neurotic experience
is stronger, more intense, and lasts a longer time. In the Mantle twins for instance, we
have seen that it lasted quite a long time, so long as to enable them turn their pathology
into their object of study and make a profession out of themselves.
Creativity going wrong and producing weapons rather than surgical tools is a
recurrent theme in Cronenberg films. What we see in Dead Ringers and Videodrome is
the same process of degeneration, a worstward movement of the experiment undertaken,
in different fields of knowledge. Just as Maxs sadistic fantasies turn against him, the
Mantle twins surgical instruments turn into sharp edged weapons which they direct
against themselves at the end. What is portrayed is the characters inability to pass from
the state of being governed by the unconscious drives, to conscious desiring. The passage
from death drive to the desiring production is never achieved in Cronenbergs films. As
71

Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis of Children, 132

125

we have seen in eXistenZ the subjects only become capable of desiring when they are in
the virtual world of the game, attached to an organic bio-port with an umbilical cord. In
escape from the realists Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) hides in her own game. At
the end of the film we learn that even her escape from the realists was part of the game, a
construct of her own psyche, her own creation. We also learn that eXistenZ is only a game
within another game called transCendenZ and that the realists trying to annihilate the
project turn out to be Allegra Geller and her security guard (Jude Law). As it was in
Videodrome so too it is in eXistenZ; what the virtual world of another reality does is to
sustain the subject with the environment in which he/she can act out his/her fantasies in a
virtual realm beyond the flesh. Within the game Allegra and the security guard can make
love, outside it they have a purpose; they have to free desire from the confines of
virtuality and restore it to its true place, that place being the material world.
When Jude Law refuses to undergo the operation of being penetrated by what
looks like a big machine gun, so that the bio-port can be plugged into him, Allegra Geller
says, this is it, you see! This is the cage of your own making. Which keeps you trapped
and pacing about in the smallest space possible. Break out of the cage of your own, break
out now. Allegra Geller sees the physical world as limiting and unsatisfying. To go
beyond this limited existence she creates an illusory time-space in which the player is in
the service of his/her unconscious drives which are themselves represented in material
objects. When the bio-port is plugged into the subject the subjects five senses are
governed by the sensual effects the game creates on the subject. The illusion of safety and
security is the result of the depersonalization of experience; it is the Other that plays the
game through me. A fantasy world which keeps death at bay, an impersonal
consciousness that thinks through me, and a body that never dies. What the game
126

eXistenZ does, then, is to promise immortality in a spiritual realm beyond the flesh. And
yet it does this through stimulating the centres of reception in the body which activate the
five senses. When Jude Law licks Allegra Gellers bio-port hole she immediately
withdraws and asks, what was that? Surprised at his own act, Jude Law says, That
wasnt me, it was my game character. I couldnt have done that! After a very brief
silence they realize that since they are in the game they cant be held responsible for their
actions and start kissing passionately.
The umbilical cords in eXistenZ, which seem to connect the subject with a world
beyond the physical, in which there is no guilt, no responsibility, and no death, turn out to
be the chain of negativity chaining the subject to a detached, meaningless, inauthentic
existence. It was Hegel who pointed out that freedom without society is meaningless and
not freedom as such. For freedom to become freedom it should be situated in a historical
context and hence gain its meaning in relation to time. What Heidegger borrows from
Hegel is this idea of the necessity of the social for any meaningful activity to take place.
Heideggers attitude is very different from the Romantic understanding of freedom as
something that can only be experienced in isolation, where, detached from his social
environment, the subject bonds in a more profound way with nature, and unite with all
the forces of nature in a state of euphoria.
This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the
infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling
dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the
symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form,
before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the

127

other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its

function as subject.72
Lacans Mirror Stage describes the childs first confrontation with its image of
itself on the mirror. Lacan says that the child is not as unified as it sees itself on the
mirror. But the child needs this illusion of unity to be able to see itself as a being in the
world. This is when the sense of omnipotence begins in the child.
The primary processwhich is simply what I have tried to define
for you in my last few lectures in the form of the unconscious
must once again, be apprehended in its experience of rupture,
between perception and consciousness, in that non-temporal locus,
I said, which forces us to posit what Freud calls, in homage to
Fechner, die Idee anderer Lokalitat, the idea of another locality,
another space, another scene, the between perception and
consciousness.73
If we keep in mind that the primary process is the death-drive then we can see that
Lacans shift is away from Cartesian dualisms of subject and object, mind and body,
nature and culture. In Lacan there is an opposition to a Heideggerian attitude towards the
world and its relation to the self. A third world is introduced in addition to the imaginary
and the real. And this third world is the symbolic. For Lacan, between the illusory sense
of omnipotence and the symbolic loss of self with the acquisition of language, there is a
dead zone, a space in-between, a gap between the symbolic and the imaginary. That space

72

Jacques Lacan,, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977), 2
73
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 56
128

is the Lacanian Unconscious, the Real which refers to what Descartes called Cogito,
Freud Ego, and Heidegger non-being.
What Descartes and to some extent Freud presuppose is that there is a cogito
before anything else, that there is an ego that says I. There can be no self in relation to
an external world before language. There is nothing before the subject says I. For the
ego to begin to exist and develop it has to acquire language and say I first. The real
entry into the symbolic takes place when the subject is sufficiently equipped with
language and capable of realizing that I is an illusion, that the self who is to say I is
lost upon entry into the realm of language. This illusion, however, this imaginary self
who says I, should be preserved at least to a minimal extent, otherwise the Real slips
through and life becomes painful. It is a necessary illusion, the subject, if one wants to be
able to do things. Fantasies are illusions we need to keep the Real of our desire at bay.
Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience,
the real should have presented itself in the form of that which is
unassimilable in itin the form of the trauma, determining all that
follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin? We
are now at the heart of what may enable us to understand the
radical character of the conflictual notion introduced by the
opposition of the pleasure principle and the reality principle
which is why we cannot conceive the reality principle as having,
by virtue of its ascendancy, the last word. 74
So the Real is in-between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The
conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle takes place when and if

74

Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 55

129

the subject falls victim to the drives and the pleasure principle by letting himself be
governed by the unconscious drives.
For Lacan progress takes place when and if the subject passes from the state of
being governed by unconscious drives to becoming capable of desiring and being desired.
Since for Lacan desire is the desire of the Other, desire is essentially social and symbolic,
which means that it is the drive that is prior to the symbolic, and the imaginary is the
support of the reality principle, without which the Real would enter the scene and destroy
the subject. Lacan forgets that death-drive is the cause of conflict as well as being its
effect. The death-drive preceeds and proceeds the conflict at the same time. But with the
traumatic incident the subjects relation to the Real changes. The direction of this change
may lead to destruction as much as it may lead to creation. It is a matter of becoming
capable of using the unconscious drives in the way of producing new forms of life.
5. Naked Lunch and The Body Without Organs
The Naked Lunch I am concerned with here is David Cronenbergs film about
William Burroughs writing process of Naked Lunch. The film, rather than being a direct
adaptation of the novel, is a distillation of Burroughss life as he strives to write himself
out of the past. We see Burroughs progressively deteriorating to the level of a dumb beast
as he tries to make sense of his sufferings in and through writing. In the introduction he
wrote for the 1985 edition of his earlier novel Queer, the writing of which dates back to
1953 following the two years period of depression, guilt, and anxiety ridden self-hatred
after his accidental shooting of his wife Joan in September 1951, Burroughs, in an almost
confessional manner, explicates the sources of his compulsion to write. Writing, for
Burroughs, represents his lifelong pursuit of getting out of consciousness and reaching
the area between fantasy and reality.
130

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have

become a writer but for Joans death, and to a realization of the
extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my
writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant
need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan
brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and
maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no
choice except to write my way out.75
The death of Joan creates a space within Burroughs into which he escapes, and
attempts to fill with his writings. Cronenberg explicates what Burroughs had already
implied in his introduction to Queer. In the film writing in particular and creativity in
general is shown to be a response to a traumatic incident, that is, production of fantasies
to compensate for the horrors of life. As the film proceeds so does the mental
deterioration of Bill Lee who represents Burroughs in the movie. The first signs of Lees
split come when he is arrested by two policemen for the possession of dangerous
substances. What they are talking about is the bug-powder which, Lee, who has given up
writing to become a bug exterminator, uses to kill insects. The two policemen ask him to
demonstrate his profession. One of them puts an insect the size of a hand on a pile of bug
powder to see if the insect will die. As the insect begins moving its wings, arms, and legs
they leave the room and Lee with the insect. As soon as they leave the room the insect
tells Lee through a mouth-anus at its back that it has instructions for him, that it comes
from the Interzone, that his wife Joan is not actually human and that he has to kill her.
The insect asks Lee if he could put some bug powder on its mouth-anus upon the
application of which it starts to make noises and movements as if in an orgy. In the next
75

William Burroughs, Queer (New York: Penguin, 1985)

131

scene we are in reality and Joan is asking Lee to put some bug powder on her lips. As
wee see a few scenes later that the mouth-anus turns out to be the abyss, the bottomless
depth, or the space in-between fantasy and reality in which Lee loses himself and shoots
his wife.
This presentation of fantasy and reality side by side occurs throughout the film. It
is when the gap between fantasy and reality disappears that the Unconscious manifests
itself. In the case of Bill Lee the undesired event is pushed back into the unconscious in
turn causing an accumulation of sadistic impulses in him. These sadistic impulses are
then externalized in and through writing. For Burroughs writing was cathartic in that it
liberated the untamed drives and prevented the manifestation of aggression in the external
world. In Cronenberg what we see is almost the opposite of this attitude to writing. As we
know from Dead Ringers, Videodrome, and eXistenZ, for Cronenberg writing and
creativity have destructive rather than therapeutic effects on the writer. In the film Bill
Lee emerges as the culmination of these two opposing views on not only the creative
process but also the relationship between the creator and the creation, the subject and the
object, mind and body. As the arena of this conflict Bill Lees world is that of the one inbetween the internal and the external worlds, the Interzone, or in psychoanalytic terms
the Unconscious, the Real, where there is no self or not self.
Interzone is Tangiers on the North African coast where Burroughs wrote
Naked Lunch in 1953. In those days it was a place of escape for the self-exiled artists and
artisans. At Interzone everyone has their own particular universality in one big universal
cesspool and that cesspool is Lees fantasy world. The Real, or the Unconscious, is
impossible to represent and all those monsters, bug-typewriters, and disgusting images
are only the creations of Lees hallucinating mind. In it every universality is surrounded
132

by many other universalities and each universality is a body without organs. Upon arrival
at the Interzone Lee starts to see his typewriter as an insect resembling the one which he
had first encountered in the interrogation room at the police station. The bug-typewriter
becomes the mouth-anus mechanism, the partial object opening a gap through language
in-between the body without organs and the organ without a body.
Orality is naturally prolonged in cannibalism and anality in the
case of which partial objects are excreta, capable of exploding the
mothers body, as well as the body of the infant. The bits of one are
always the persecutors of the other, and, in this abominable
mixture which constitutes the Passion of the nursing infant,
persecutor and persecuted are always the same. In this system of
mouth-anus or aliment-excrement, bodies burst and cause other
bodies to burst in a universal cesspool.76
Here Deleuze is referring to Melanie Kleins Psychoanalysis of Children. The
state of being which Deleuze summarizes is the paranoid-schizoid position of the child,
the world of simulacra. At this stage, which preceeds Lacans mirror stage, the child is
not yet capable of identification. There is an introjection-projection mechanism going on
but the objects, internal and external, are experienced as bad objects. The conception of
goodness has not yet developed in the child. Since there is no good object for the child to
identify with there is no condition of possibility for the identificatory process with a good
or a bad object, there is no self or not self.
The paranoid-schizoid position is followed by the manic-depressive position in
which identification with a good object takes place. The passage from paranoid-schizoid
introjection-projection to manic-depressive identification is the process of passing
76

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 187
133

through the Interzone, or in Lacans words traversing the fantasy. In Deleuzes terms
this process is the hovering of an impersonal consciousness over the transcendental field
of partial objects. The bug-typewriter is Lees impersonal consciousness manifesting
itself in the form of a paranoid fantasy through the bug-typewriter, a body without organs
which is pretending to be an organ without a body. In fact it is neither a body without
organs nor an organ without a body and yet it is both at the same time. It is a becoming in
between being and non-being.
Cronenbergs move is away from Burroughss Kafkaesque understanding of the
body as metaphor and towards a Deleuzean narrative of the metamorphosis of the body in
a literal sense. All those self-destructive creators are inverted into the spotlight in and
through Cronebergs films and this enables Cronenberg to contemplate on the creative
process as an inversion of destructive process and fill the film with this contemplation.
What we see in Naked Lunch is the death drive in conflict with the life drive.
In Deleuze the body without organs is the metaphor of the death drive. And since
the death drive is a response to the fragmentation of the self, it can only take the form of a
paranoid fantasy projected onto the Real. The body without organs is the partial objects
brought together in a totalizing way, in a way that deprives them of their partialities.
What the schizoid position opposes to bad partial objects
introjected and projected, toxic and excremental, oral and analis
not a good object, even if it were partial. What is opposed is rather
an organism without parts, a body without organs, with neither
mouth nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and
being complete, at this price.77

77

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 188

134

The body without organs, then, is the absence of a connection between the
subjects inside and outside. The subject, in a state of total negation, neither eats nor
excretes. It eats nothingness itself and becomes the catatonic (w)hole. It is not out of the
body without organs that the subject is born but from the paranoid-schizoid position
which consists of a not yet formed consciousness, an impersonal consciousness violently
attacking the external world and splitting the given unities. As opposed to the body
without organs it consists of projection and introjection of the partial objects surrounding
the subject to create fantasies such as an illusionary ego, and learns to keep the body
without organs, or the Real at bay. The paranoid-schizoid position is followed by the
manic-depressive position which corresponds to the formation of the super-ego and the
sustenance of a balance between id, ego, and super-ego.
Burroughss cut-up and fold-in techniques appear to be the two constituent parts
of his defense mechanism against the spectre of Joan haunting him. To escape from the
paralyzing state of being haunted by the spectre, that is, not to turn into a body without
organs, he carries the projection-introjection mechanism to its furthest and literally and
unconsciously puts words and sentences, partial objects, next to and within each other to
make up discontinuities, cause ruptures and keep the Real at bay. Through giving a voice
to the Real as it is before symbolization, Burroughss intends to prevent it from becoming
real, from being actualized hence submitting the governance of his actions to an external
force. It is this mechanism of repression inherent in the cut-up technique that causes what
it tries to cure. The cut-up technique involves literally cutting-up passages and putting
them together as a new text which would be neither the one nor the other, hence
deforming the syntax. The fold-in technique involves folding into each other the different
parts of the same text, hence distorting the order of time. In both states what is at stake is
135

a total negation of the external world as a result of its being considered as hostile. In
Burroughs the paranoid fantasy projected on the real replaces reality with its inverted
version, that is, Burroughs turns what he imagines the external world to be against itself
by creating a paranoid fantasy involving a scenario in which the subject believes itself to
be governed by an internally constituted external and evil force. Burroughs discovered
cut-up and fold-in techniques as a defense mechanism against the paranoid fantasy he
constructed around himself. To get out of this mad symbolic world, he decided to slash it
into pieces and connect it with other texts that are themselves torn apart.
Burroughss cut-up technique is a result of his search for a way of desymbolizing
the paranoid symbolic world he had constructed and projected onto the external world.
Burroughs thought resymbolization was therapeutic in that it gave voice to the evil within
in the way of expelling it. Cut-up technique aims at desymbolizing the totalitarian system
surrounding the subject and was a defense against the totalitarian nature of this
resymbolization. Burroughs himself admits in a letter written to Kerouac shortly after
beginning to use the cut-up and fold-in techniques that writing now causes me an almost
unendurable pain.78 In Naked Lunch the movie, the theme of the materiality of language
recurs through the encounters between the bug-typewriter and Bill Lee. Bill Lee creates
an insect within, projects it onto his typewriter, and talks with it. His creations have
taken on lives of their own and are doing and saying things mostly against him.
In Nova Express, Burroughss 1964 text, The Invisible Man says, These
colourless sheets are what flesh is made fromBecomes flesh when it has colour and
writingThat is Word and Image write the message that is you on colourless sheets
determine all flesh.79 Burroughs had a strong sense of the materiality of language. When
78
79

William Burroughs, Letters (New York: Penguin, 1994), 286

William Burroughs, Nova Express, (London: Panther, 1982), 30

136

he has The Invisible Man say becomes flesh when it has colour and writing he is in a
way referring to the Unconscious as the invisible man who is striving to become visible
to himself and to others in and through language.
Foucaults interpretation of Benthams Panoptic mechanism becomes relevant
here. In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault presents the Panopticon as a metaphor of
how power operates within modern western society. A revolutionary apparatus for its
time (19th century), the Panopticon was more than just a model of prison for Foucault, it
was a mechanism to keep an absent eye on the prisoner, to keep them under control at all
times.
The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks
to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the
ability to penetrate into mens behaviour; knowledge follows the
advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all
the surfaces on which power is exercised.80
The formulation of the concept of the Panopticon involves not only seeing
without being seen, but also a mechanism that imposes both their differences and their
resemblances upon the subjects. So the subjects difference from other subjects is itself
externally constituted, but is also internal to the subject. The subject is the product of the
mechanism in which the subject finds/loses itself, and participates in the setting of the
trap. Some subjects are produced in such a way as to act on an illusory sense of
consciousness, that they are in control of their lives and events surrounding them, that
they are freely choosing their destiny, when in fact all the rules and possibilities of action
are always already set. In a panoptic mechanism taking on passive and submissive roles
brings wealth, love, health, and even happiness. In a panoptic mechanism everyone is a
80

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 204

137

slave, but some are less so than the others. In a panoptic mechanism submissiveness
brings power. The system is such that the subject, to feel secure, takes on a passive role.
In return the subject is recognized as worthy of a higher step on the social ladder, which
brings an illusionary sense of security. The efficiency of the panoptic mechanism depends
on its ability to produce submissive/adaptive/rational subjects.
Burroughss mind works exactly like a panoptic mechanism. And I think this has
been one of the major concerns of Cronenberg throughout the shooting of the Naked
Lunch. What we have in the movie is a man who has been caught up in a trap that he
himself set. Bill Lee projects the construct of his psyche onto the external world and it is
by doing this that he finds/loses himself in the trap, dismembered. The paranoid fantasy
he constructs becomes so powerful that it engulfs him causing his detachment from the
external world and leading to the eventual loss of the gap between fantasy and reality. It
as this point that the Real slips through and tears him apart. He, in his mind, literally
becomes a slashed monster, sees himself thus, as he is not, and becomes other than
himself. His becoming-other, however, is in the wrong direction, or rather results in a
confusion concerning the relationship between the subject and the object.
Burroughs believed that literature gives birth to action. He also saw writing itself
as an action. At the end of the film we see Bill Lee at the border on his way back to
Annexia from the Interzone. Two guards ask him what his occupation is. He says he is a
writer. They want him to demonstrate. He takes out the gun from his pocket. Joan is at the
back of the car. Its time for their William Tell routine. Joan puts a glass on her head. Lee
misses the glass and shoots Joan on the head. The guards are satisfied. The spectator
witnesses this crime and remembers the person irrelevantly looking out of the window

138

when they were slaughtering Kafkas K. at the end of The Trial. Who was that person?
Was it God? Was it a single man? Was it all of humanity?
6. The Evil Spirit and The Spiritual Automaton
It is a recurrent theme in science-fiction-thriller movies that in time humanity
turns into the slave of its own creation, namely of machines. It is precisely because of this
fear of being replaced that humanity attempts to get out of time, out of the physical, and
eventually falls on the side of what it was attempting to escape from; be that which they
fall in the direction of metaphysics or pure-physics, in both cases their thought itself
becomes machinic.
The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for
supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the
director may spy on all the employees that he has under his
orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders [] and
it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An
inspector arriving unexpectedly at the center of the
Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without
anything concealed from him, how the entire establishment
is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed as he is in the
middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the directors
own fate entirely bound up with it?81
Panopticon, then, is a mechanism that disperses power as it produces submissive
subjects. The transparency of the building makes it a model for the exercise of power by
society as a whole. The subject becomes one with the mechanism surrounding it and so
becomes the effect and the functionary at the same time. In short, the subject starts
81

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 204

139

operating like and feeling itself as a machine. The body is not replaced by a machine but
starts to work like the machine it is connected to. This is the contamination of the subject
by the object.
Slavoj Zizek points out Deleuzes emphasis on the passage from metaphor and
towards metamorphosis in terms of the difference between machines replacing humans
and the becoming-machine of a man.
The problem is not how to reduce mind to neuronal material
processes (to replace the language of mind by the language of
brain processes, to translate the first one into the second one) but,
rather, to grasp how mind can emerge only by being embedded in
the network of social relations and material supplements. In other
words, the true problem is not How, if at all, could machines
imitate the human mind? but How does the very identity of
human mind rely on external mechanical supplements? How does
it incorporate machines?82
In Cronenbergs films we see the theme of machines replacing humans in the
process of being replaced by the theme of humans connected to machines, or machines as
extensions of humans providing them with another realm beyond and yet still within the
material world; the psychic and the material horizontally situated next to each other. In
eXistenZ, for instance, we have seen how the game-pod is plugged into the subjects spine
through a bio-port and becomes an extension of the body. In Naked Lunch the typewriter
becomes Lees extension. In Burroughss the obsession was still with the machine taking
over the body. In Cronenbergs adaptation of Burroughs the obsession is with body and
machine acting upon one another. What Burroughs experienced with his body but was
82

Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 16

140

unable to express becomes possible to express with the film. As we know from his
writings on his routines Burroughs himself was becoming-machine internally, he was
incorporating the dualistic and mechanical vision of the world surrounding him, but he
thought his body was being attacked by external forces and the space he occupied was
being invaded by forces that belonged to an altogether different realm, an external world.
In Cronenbergs Naked Lunch we see Bill Lee becoming a spiritual automaton to keep
the Evil Spirit within at bay. The paradox is that the Evil Spirit is itself his own
construction which in turn constructs him as a spiritual automaton constructing an
external Evil Spirit.
In what follows I will attempt to show that Cronenbergs films are caught in a
vicious cycle, that they are self-deconstructive, and that if one thinks too much about
them they not only turn back on themselves but also collapse in on themselves. This is
because they are shut up in themselves in a highly solipsistic fashion and are the victims
of the way they attack what they consider to be dangerous for humanity. In short I will try
to show how Cronenbergs films deconstruct themselves and invalidate their own stance
before what they criticize, and this turns them into suicidal rituals before which the
spectator is expected to recoil in horror.
One example of what I have said concerning the self-deconstruction inherent in
Cronenbergs films is in the middle of Naked Lunch where Tom Frost, also a writer, who
appears to be Joans husband in Interzone, tells Bill Lee that he has been killing his wife
everyday for years.
Tom: There are no accidents. For example, I have been killing my
own wife slowly, over a period of years.
Lee: What?
141

Tom: Well, not intentionally, of course. On the level of conscious

intention, its insane, monstrous.
Lee: But you do consciously know it. You just said it. Were
discussing it.
Tom: Not consciously. This is all happening telephatically. Nonconsciously.[close-up of Toms mouth, his lips moving in disharmony
with what he is actually saying] If you look carefully at my lips,
youll realize that Im actually saying something else. Im not
actually telling you about the several ways Im gradually murdering
Joan. About the housekeeper Fadela whom Ive hired to make Joan
deathly ill by witchcraft. About the medicines and drugs Ive given
her. About the nibbling away at her self-esteem and sanity that Ive
managed, without being at all obvious about it. [the movement of his
lips become harmonious with what he is saying] Whereas Joanie
finds that she simply cannot be as obsessively precise as she wants to
be unless she writes everything in longhand.
We have to keep in mind before engaging in analysis that all this is happening in
Lees mind, that Interzone is a construct of his psyche, that he is actually in New York,
that he is hallucinating all this Interzone business, and that the year is 1953. What we
have here is the loss of the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
However, this is not a real loss of the boundary because we, the spectators, are informed
beforehand that all this is happening in Lees mind. There is only the inside of Lees
mind, and if there is anything lost it is the reality of the external world. Lee only hears the
echoes of his projections. The murder of Joan has had such an impact on Lee that he is
142

hearing nothing that the other says and he is replacing this nothing with his own scenarios
concerning whats actually going on outside.
What does the disintegration between Toms words and actions signify? It
signifies the double-bind situation in which Cronenbergs films are caught. In other
words he is unconsciously communicating that which he thinks he is not saying. He is
unconsciously doing what he thinks he is arguing against; that creativity brings with it
destruction, that progress and regress are complementary. In Naked Lunch writing is
identified with killing ones wife. To keep the actual killing of the wife at bay, Lee writes
not to rationalize the murder but to irrationalize not-killing ones wife, and we know this
from the fact that Tom Frosts words are only projections of Lees psyche.
This scene also explicates Cronenbergs attitude towards the recurring theme of a
psyche-soma split in his films. But more importantly, since Naked Lunch is mainly
concerned with the activity of writing and what happens to someone who is in the process
of creating something, this scene deals with the relationship between body and language.
Here I will leave aside the exhausted subject of a mind-body split who cannot make a
distinction between appearance and reality and move towards the more recent theme of
the relationship between bodies and languages, with the hope of opening up a field across
which one passes and in the process of this passage becomes the embodiment of a new
possibility of signification, another sign, neither within nor without the old mode of
signification. For this a third dualism is required, and that third dualism, being that of
language and Event, has already been worked through by Deleuze.
7. From Metaphor and Towards Metamorphosis
With Deleuze the Cartesian mind-body dualism has been replaced by bodylanguage dualism. Without being too insistent about it at this stage I would like to hint at
143

where the relationship between these dualisms is heading. I propose, therefore, what
Deleuze has already pointed out, namely a new possibility of analysing the nature of
dialectics in the context of the relationship between language and its affective quality,
what he calls the sense-event. As he puts it in his Time-Image, Deleuze thinks that neither
the grounds of mind-body dualism nor those of body-language dualism are sufficient to
theorize a progressive movement towards a new mode of signification.
These are no longer grounds for talking about a real or possible
extension capable of constituting an external world: we have
ceased to believe in it, and the image is cut off from the external
world. But the internalisation or integration in a whole as
consciousness of self has no less disappeared.83
There is no longer any movement of internalisation or
externalization, integration or differentiation, but a confrontation
of outside and an inside independent of distance, this thought
outside itself and this un-thought within thought.84
Deleuze invites exploration of a text in the way of explicating a progressive
potential within the text which had hitherto been consciously or unconsciously ignored or
neglected, or even repressed. This theme is linked to Deleuzes life-long concern with
Nietzsches thought of eternal recurrence and difference qua repetition. The emergence of
the unthought within thought requires an encounter with the already thought in such a
way as to expose its inner dynamics and hence show whats inside it as its outside. That
is, what the thought seems to be excluding as its other constitutes its subject as selfidentical. It is through the exclusion of the other that the subject becomes itself. If we
83
84

Gilles Deleuze, Time-Image, (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 277

Deleuze,, 363
144

apply this to subject-object relations it becomes obvious that the split between the subject
and the object is itself a construct, but nevertheless a necessary construct for the subjects
subsistence. In-between the subject and the object, then, there is an unfillable gap that is
constitutive of both the subject and the object.
[]thought, as power which has not always existed, is born from
an outside more distant than any external world, and, as power
which does not yet exist, confronts an inside, an unthinkable or unthought, deeper than any internal world []85
For Deleuze new thought can only emerge as a curious absurdity, as in the Beckett
case. That is because the new thought, although it comes from within the old thought, is
beyond the interiority and the exteriority to a context in its primary emergence. This
means that new thought always appears to be a non-sense, for no thought can be
meaningful without a context. But non-sense is not the absence of sense. It is, rather,
sense with its own particular context which it creates in the process of emergence from
out of the old context. Being without the predominant context makes the thought seem
absurd, non-sense, but not meaningless, for meaningless means absence of thought.
What is a transcendental field? It can be distinguished from
experience in that it doesnt refer to an object or belong to a
subject (empirical representation). It appears therefore as
stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive
impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of
consciousness without a self. It may seem curious that the
transcendental be defined by such immediate givens: we
will speak of a transcendental empiricism in contrast to
85

Deleuze, 273
145

everything that makes up the world of the subject and the

object.86
Joe Bosquet must be called Stoic. He apprehends the
wound that he bears deep within his body in its eternal truth
as a pure event. To the extent that events are actualised in
us, they wait for us and invite us in. They signal us: My
wound existed before me, I was born to embody it. It is a
question of attaining this will that the event creates in us; of
becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us,
the Operator: of producing surfaces and linings in which
the event is reflected, finds itself again in incorporeal and
manifests in us the neutral splendour which it possesses in
itself in its impersonal and pre-individual nature, beyond
the general and the particular, the collective and the private.
It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world.87
In this light we now see more clearly what Deleuze is aiming at with his
disjunctive synthesis of transcendence and immanence leading to his transcendental
empiricism. Empiricism starts from the material world rather than from the metaphysical
world which it sees only as a product of the representations of experience through
language. In fact, it knows no world other than the material world, and even if it does it
prioritizes the physical world over the metaphysical world. Experience of the world
before subjectivation is what Deleuze is trying to access. Since reaching the presubjective field of partial objects is possible only through language, and he knows that, he
86

Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 25

87

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 148
146

says that we have to produce that pre-subjective field which is called the transcendental
field of immanence.
The event considered as non-actualized (indefinite) is lacking in
nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants: a
transcendental field, a plane of immanence, a life, singularities.88
What we encounter with Deleuze is therefore a replacement not only of bodymind dualism with body-language dualism, but also a beyond of both, a triplicity; bodylanguage-event. The event is the sense-event. It is the emergence of new sense not out of
non-sense but out of the old sense, that is, a simultaneous explication of a new sense
within the old sense. The new sense always appears in the form of an absurdity at first,
but in time, through repetition and persistence this absurdity starts to appear in a new
light and becomes new sense. Absurd is not the same as non-sense or absence of sense,
but explicates the non-sense inherent in sense, and hence is in-between non-sense and
sense. Through the absurd the unconscious manifests itself revealing another realm of
consciousness which goes beyond the subject and the object and yet that is at the same
time in-between them. This consciousness is the becoming of being. Being is a whole in
process, that is, being is its own becoming whole, therefore it is always incomplete and
yet whole. Being is an incomplete idea of wholeness which is in the process of becoming
present. Since presence can only be at present, and since time is only at present, the presubjective impersonal consciousness is in between past and present, that is, in-between
non-being and being. The event is the emergence of being out of becoming, what Deleuze
calls a static genesis. This emergence, however, has neither a beginning nor an end, and
therefore being is the becoming of an impersonal consciousness; I am all the names in
history, says Nietzsche.
88

Deleuze, 31-2
147

This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may
be one to another, but only between-times, between-moments; it
doesnt just come about or come after but offers the immensity of
an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already
happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.89
At this moment in time, and in this place all the wounds of humanity of the past
are incarnated. One has to feel the pain of all the past times, empathize with all those
sufferings and learn from them for progress to take place. It is not the individual
sufferings of a single person that Hegel, Nietzsche, or Deleuze talk about. Theory,
cinema, and literature are not personal affairs. What is at stake is the presence of all the
already dead bodies that have to be turned into fertilizers. How to make use of the already
dead bodies in the service of progress as opposed to the ones who kill in the service of
progress? Suffering and pain indeed weaken the subject and yet there is no way other
than turning this weakness, this impoverishment of thought into an affirmative will to
power beyond the life/death drive. Perhaps a more than banal accident of life but just like
Bosquet my wound existed before me. I am always already injured and if there are
many more wounds awaiting to be embodied by me, well then, this indeed signifies that it
has always been, still is, and will never cease becoming a time of passage from homo
sapiens across homo historia and it appears to be towards homo tantum.

Conclusion of Part II
The unconscious of the subject is a product of cultural products such as
advertisements, films, and books. Since the unconscious is itself a cultural product,
giving free rein to the unconscious to express itself serves the reproduction of the cultural
89

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 29

148

context in which the unconscious is itself produced. To be able to create difference

without having to die the subject has to turn the unconscious into a void within the
symbolic out of which a new way of looking at the world can manifest itself. A subject is
he/she who actively submits to the unknown in such a way as to create the condition of
possibility out of a condition of impossibility for the creation of a new beginning.
In a world which the subject loses itself surrounded by lies and illusions it is very
difficult for one to become a subject since a subject is nothing but a void lost upon entry
into the symbolic. Finding of itself of a subject means finding itself of a subject as a void,
that is, a pre-symbolic hole, or a hole within the symbolic. This means that finding itself
of a subject is its losing itself as a symbolic being. And this means that what is found by
regressing to the pre-symbolic is nothing. So a subject is that which cannot be found, it
can only be created in and through the destruction of its symbolic self. In this context
becoming a subject refers to the process of creation of a self-conscious consciousness out
of the void.
We must keep in mind that the pre-symbolic void is not actually before the
symbolic but beneath it. Opening a hole within the symbolic through cont(r)action creates
the condition of possibility for the contact between the known and the unknown, between
the subject and its a-subjective self, between the conscious desiring and the unconscious
drives.
This may sound strange but the death drive and the life drive are both of the
symbolic world. They are symbolic constructs, results of a will to reduce life to a
mechanistic dualism. It is the conscious desiring that is capable of clearing a space for the
emergence of the new.

149

Creativity and destructivity are not mutually exclusive. For the creation of
something new one must destroy something that already exists. This destruction of
something that already exists should simultaneously be a creation of nothing that already
exists. Since negation is a process that necessarily depends on that which is negated, it is
impossible for negation to create something completely new. The negated contaminates
the negator. It is the affirmative recreation of that which already exists that truly destroys
it. But what exactly is affirmative recreation? Affirmative recreation is the exposition of
the negating quality of that which already exists. By exposing the transcendence oriented
negating quality of that which already exists, affirmative recreation exposes the
fictionality of knowledge; hence affirms knowledge as it is and opens a gap between
knowledge and truth. This gap is also a gap between the the past and the present; a space
between the known and the unknown out of which a future generates itself.

PART THREE

Post-traumatic Writing Disorder

in which I, and with me the reader, hand in hand, come to a realization that sometimes
the only way to keep affirming is to affirm the fragility of the affirmative cont(r)act itself.
It is only by affirming a broken and irregularly beating heart in its broken irregularity
150

that it becomes possible for one to relate to it. Affirmation of life as it is, the reader is
invited to practice, is only the beginning of a fragile and yet beautiful friendship

Chapter V: Creativity and The Unconscious

He has me say things saying its not me, theres profundity for you, he has me who
say nothing say its not me.90
Samuel Beckett

1. Surreal Faces of The Unconscious

In 1916 a group of artists and writers established Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and
started the aesthetic movement now known as Dada. This word was found randomly from
a dictionary. But Dadaists did not choose Dada for its meaning, they were completely
indifferent to the meaning of the name of the movement. They used the Cabaret Voltaire
90

Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing (London: John Calder, 1999), 23

151

for their gatherings. The artists known as the Zurich Group involved Jean Arp, Tristan
Tzara, and Hugo Ball. An outcome of the loss of meaning in the defeated countries after
the First World War, Dada was iconoclastic. It was against all kinds of conservatism,
traditionalism, holiness, and everything else that could be an obstacle for individual
freedom, including Dada itself. Do not trust Dada had said Tristan Tzara. Dada is
everything. Dada doubts everything. But real Dadas are against DADA. 91 Dada does not
believe in absolutes. It does not accept any kind of system. It ridicules every kind of
methodology. Tzaras recipe to write a Dadaist poem is a proof of this. 92 But more
importantly, it is in fact an attack on art itself.
Dada, the most radical movement within the European avantgarde, no longer criticizes the individual aesthetic fashions and
schools that preceded it, but criticizes art as an institution: in other
words, with the historical avant-garde art enters the stage of selfcriticism.93
Dada is anti-dogmatic in its strict sense. However, its anti-dogmatism turns into
dogmatism. Although Dada had challenged almost everything, it was incapable of
liberating imagination because it didnt take into consideration the role of consciousness
and the importance of making conscious choices in the process of creation.

91

C. W. E Bigsby, Dada and Surrealism (London: Methuen, 1972), 7

Tzara: Take one newspaper. Take one pair of scissors. Choose from that newspaper an
article of the length desired for the poem you intend to write. Cut out the article. Next cut
out with care each of the words forming that article. Next put them in a bag. Mix gently.
Take out one by one each excision in the order they fall from the bag. Copy carefully. The
poem will resemble you. Voila, there you are , an infinitely original poet of a seductive
sensibility, even if still not understood by the vulgar. Quoted by Renato Poggioli, The
Theory of The Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Massachussetts and London:
Harward University Press, 1982), 190
93
Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the
Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7
152
92

It is obvious that Dada trusts no values. It does not trust language. For it, language
is a barrier rather than a bridge. Even Andr Bretons claim, who is not exactly a Dadaist,
expresses this scepticism.
Language is the worst of conventions because it imposes upon us
the use of formulas and verbal associations which do not belong to
us, which embody next to nothing of our true natures: the very
meanings of words are fixed and unchangeable only because of an
abuse of our power by the collectivity.94
For Breton our true natures, if there is such a thing, stand outside language and is
often distorted by it. Influenced by Dada and driven by Bretons theories, Surrealists tried
to give imagination free of reason the central role in their works. The Surrealist
movement aimed at seeing and showing a superior reality through the unconscious with
total disregard to reason. Breton deliberately drew on Freuds concept of free
association and theorized a way of making the unconscious accessible without
translating its contents into the familiar forms of conscious mind. At the heart of Bretons
theory is the idea that the psychic and the material are one and that the conscious and the
unconscious are in constant interaction with one another.
It is not merely that I think there is almost always a complexity in
imaginary sounds. (The question of the unity and speed of
dictation remains on the order of the day.) I am also certain that
visual or tactile images (primitive, unpreceeded or unaccompanied
by words, like the representation of blankness or elasticity without
intervention previous, concomitant or even subsequent to the
words that express them or derive from them) give free access to
94

Quoted by Bigsby, 26
153

the unmeasurable region between the conscious and the

unconscious. But if automatic dictation can be obtained with a
certain continuity, the process of unravelling and linking these
images is extremely difficult to grasp, presenting, to the best of our
knowledge, an eruptive character.95
Breton aimed at putting to use Freuds method of free association to bring to the
surface the repressed contents of the unconscious. For Breton the unconscious is a
continuous flow beneath consciousness where fantasy and reality dissolve into one
another. Breton applied to writing and painting what Freud called the dream-work and
free association. For Breton, just as the dream makes the unconscious drives accessible
through an operation that produces visual images, automatic writing, in a fashion similar
to free association, produces verbal images. Accordingly, automatic writing operates like
a dream and provides access to the unconscious without translating the unconscious
contents into conscious forms. Breton called this the real process of thought. Bretons
attitude towards the unconscious was based on the idea that the unconscious itself is not a
stage on which certain drives are visualized but that the brain is a poetry making organ
that functions as a machine producing words and images in such a way as to render the
unconscious drives capable of manifesting themselves in and through language. Breton
did not say that what the writer does by automatic writing is representing an always
already existing form but that there is nothing accessible to the mind before the
unconscious contents are given form. For Breton, giving form to the unconscious
contents was not essentially a process of translating one order of meaning into another,
but rather, that it is the goal of automatic writing and Surrealism to provide the means to
95

Andr Breton, The Automatic Message, in What is Surrealism? Ed. and trans.
Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 105-9, quoted from Poetry in Theory,
ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 190
154

make the unconscious contents accessible. With Surrealism the form itself became the
content and inversely. For the Surrealists reason was incapable of representing reality,
and there was a superior reality in higher forms of expression. It has been a recurrent
theme since Plato that there is a realm that art and poetry provides access to through the
madness of the artist or the poet. Surrealists suspicious attitude towards reason lead them
to an idealization of madness, irrationality, and unconsciousness.
To define Surrealism Breton used two words: Automatism and dream. Breton
believed that only automatically recorded dream-visions could give a voice to the
unconscious. One should not look at a dream as though one is looking outside a window;
one should rather portray the movement of the dream by being inside and outside it at the
same time. What is needed is a technique in love with the movement of the hand in touch
with the dream. The thought within the dream can only be accessed through a
spontaneous and automatic writing. A dreaming thought is not a representation; it is a
pure thought uncontaminated by the symbolic order of signs. Dream-thoughts do not
make a distinction between raw and cooked, wild and tamed; it shows that a cube has six
sides, an eye comes out of its socket, and the dead rise from the grave. Its raw materials
are the memory traces manifesting themselves in and through dreams. Erasing the trace
of a memory is erasing innocence. And even an erased memory shows itself in the dream
as its own negative. It is this showing itself of a memory trace as its own negative that
automatic writing helps carry out.
Breton was inspired by Freuds idea of a mystic writing-pad which contains the
writing of memory-traces, thoughts coming from somewhere distant and unknown, their
movements, their disappearances, and the reappearance of new traces.

155

It (the Mystic Writing-Pad) claims to be nothing more than a

writing-tablet from which notes can be erased by an easy
movement of the hand. But if it is examined more closely it will be
found that its construction shows a remarkable agreement with my
hypothetical structure of our perceptual apparatus and that it can in
fact provide both an ever-ready receptive surface and permanent
traces of the notes that have been made upon it.96
What is most interesting about the mystic writing-pad is that in it are not the
traces themselves that are of value but the traces of traces after they are erased. And the
dream of Surrealists was precisely recording the traces of dreams. How could one write
something that belongs to a completely different medium without altering it?
The texts produced by automatic writing are dream-narratives in their processes
of formation. If the dream-world is where all control over consciousness is absent, if the
dreams take place in a space-time not yet sacrificed to the symbolic, which, for the
Surrealists it always already is, then the automatic creator should strive to unite the self
and the space-time and not only write the contents of the dream but also give the texts
forms of dreams. With his technique of automatic writing Breton aimed at filling the gap
between the signifier and the signified, the subject of statement (enunciated) and the
subject of enunciation, the form and the matter of form, with his dreams; and as he
strived for uniting the process of giving form and the form given, he, in a Cartesian
fashion, deepened the cut between the subject and the object.
Automatic writing is in pursuit not of turning the subject into the signifier, it is in
pursuit of turning the subject into an absolute presence, the immaculate conception.
96

Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards

(Penguin, London: 1984), 431
156

Automatic writing destroys the distinction between the signifier and the signified and
replaces both of them with itself as the total sign. It goes beyond the difference between
the form and the matter; it wants to erase the difference between process of giving form
and the form given to the matter. For Breton, the unconscious is not a signified, it is itself
a signifier. And the unconscious is beyond the gap between nature and culture.97
Breton called the products of automatic writing the unity of rhythm. 98 The
surrealist text and the surreal reality itself have been rendered the same. What is already a
signified is imposed upon that which cannot be included in the signifying chain. What
Breton didnt realize is that the unconscious and language are essentially separate from
each other, and yet at the same time they are constitutive of one another. They are
separate and/but contiguous to one another. Without the one the other cannot be.
Breton wanted to re-establish the unmediated relationship between the object of
perception and its representation. To do this he had to remove all consciousness and
connect the writing process to an absent cause which would govern the automatic writing
process. Instead of imagining, automatism turns the eye into the object of imagination
and the subject becomes blind to itself. The subject can touch the psychic only by being
blinded by it.

The unconscious engulfs the eye and breaks-down the projection-

introjection mechanism; for it leaves nothing between the projected and the introjected
objects.
The surrealist image juxtaposes the past and future possibilities; an undivided
chain of operations connects the truth of the dream to the truth of the image. The true

97

Lacan thinks differently on the same subject. For Lacan the split between nature and culture, the subject
and the object are constitutive of both the subject and the object. The object of psychoanalysis, according to
Lacan, is the unconscious. There have been criticisms against Lacans idea of the unconscious as the object
of psychoanalysis. One of these could be saying that The unconscious is itself a product of the
psychoanalytic discourse, how can it be thought separate from psychoanalysis?
98

Andr Breton, Der Surrealismus und die malerei, 76

157

image is the fingerprint left on the table, or the trace of water left by the glass on the table
and since it is always in the form of a trace from the past it has the potential for opening
the subject up to illusions and miracles. The eye looking at the dream or the recording of
the dream regresses in time towards a primal state of things. 99 It not only brings out the
trauma, it traumatizes the looking eye, and turns the life of trauma into beauty.
The automatic dream is the true beauty, because beauty of the dream neither
knows reasons, nor the causes and effects, it is a product of chance and randomness. In
this beauty there is something that wants to lose itself in nature instead of merely
representing nature. The texts want to turn into the underground caves themselves, the
eye wants to go beyond the limits of the visible and see through nature. Surrealism is the
text not only of nature and but also of that which is behind or beneath the visibility of
nature.
2. (,)A Pineal Eye Soliloquy(,)
Mimicry is another definitive word for the operations of Surrealist aesthetics and
it enters the scene through the Surrealist publication Minotaure. Roger Caillois defines
mimicry as the activity through which the eye becomes a camera reproducing itself as a
camera.
[] life seems to lose ground, to blur the line between organism
and environment as it withdraws, thereby pushing back in equal
measure the bounds within which we may realize, as we should,
according to Pythagoras, that nature is everywhere the same.100

99

Breton, What is Surrealism?, ed. trans. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto, 1978), 121

100

Roger Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism, ed. Caludine Frank, trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish
(London: Duke University Press, 2003), 102-3

158

Mimicry tries to regress to a world before the separation between nature and
culture, the signifier and the signified. The desire to play with spectres results in a
becoming spectre. The subject leaves behind all individuality and becomes one with the
world. Mimicry wants to take the shape, colour, and the structure of nature. And it wants
to do this through cultural products. Mimicry erases the boundary between life and
literature and even when there is no head, there is the subject automatically doing what it
has to do.
According to the Surrealists, mimicry is able to deconstruct high and low.
It is the Cartesian hierarchy that is under attack. In Descartes the eye is given priority
over the foot. Mimicry aims at turning the hierarchical organization of the body against
itself. Mimicry automatically submits to the environment and that way, the subjects of
mimicry believe, the Cartesian subject is turned upside down. Descartes wanted to be
certain of everything, and his will to certainty lead him to suspicion and scepticism. To
overcome his scepticism Descartes had to question everything around him first. So as
soon as he started thinking he was actually thinking against himself. When he said, I
think, therefore I am,101 his inner voice was saying this: To be sceptical requires
thinking, and since I am sceptical about everything I must be thinking, and for me to
think requires being, therefore I must be.
Descartes came to realize that he cannot be suspicious about his suspiciousness.
For if he were to be so, he would again be suspicious. But why did Descartes think that
he was telling the truth when he said I think therefore I am? I can be sceptical about
everything but not about the I think. Therefore I cannot be sceptical about I am. I
am cannot exist without the I think. So thinking is a precondition of being and since I
101

Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of

Descartes vol. II, eds. and trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984)
159

am thinking then I must be. But what if I were to say, I am fishing, therefore I am. You
cannot say this, because fishing is not a sign of being. You might be thinking that you are
fishing, but might in fact be sleeping and having a dream in which you see yourself
fishing. But thinking is different from fishing and dreaming; being and thinking are
preconditions of one another.
What happens when Descartes is thinking of being is consciousness conceiving
itself as a thinking being. In Descartes the subject can say I outside of language.
Descartes does not distinguish between the speaking subject and the object being spoken
about. Lacans theory that language splits the subject and this split is constitutive of both
the cultural subject and the unconscious explains Descartes paradox. Descartes thought
consciousness could conceive itself directly, without the mediation of language. But this
is impossible, says Lacan, for before the acquisition of language there can be no-thought.
The subject regresses to Kleins paranoid-schizoid position and acts on his/her primitive
drives. In Kleins paranoid-schizoid position the dominant drive is the death-drive which
pulls the subject towards inorganicity and nothingness under the guise of oneness,
Nirvana, and omnipresence, it promises a life at a superior realm of being. Descartes was
imagining that he was conscious of his thought, but he was in no way conscious of what
his thought symbolically meant.
When consciousness closes in on itself and thought becomes its own object, the
subject and the object are imagined to be integrated. The gap between the subject and the
object is filled with language, which actually splits the subject and the object. What
Descartes is not conscious of is that language has a role to play in his thinking process.
Descartes is not aware that he needs language to even begin to think. And through

160

exclusion of language from the thinking process the Cartesian subject remains locked in a
stage almost prior to the mirror stage, a fantasy world of oneness with the universe.
Just like Christopher Columbus who didnt realize that he had discovered a new
continent, Descartes opens a new field for philosophical thinking but was not aware of
what he had done. He didnt name this new field. In this new field Cogito was
establishing itself upon the principle that consciousness is one with itself and at all times
thought reveals itself to itself. For Descartes God was a priori to the human subject
because for God to exist it has to situate itself in the subjects mind as God first.
Descartes had no thoughts about the role of culture in the formation of the concept of
God. And if there was a God that God couldnt be telling lies for that wouldnt fit in with
the symbolic idea of God. So all the nave truths Descartes was sceptical about at the
beginning, such as that there is a transcendental world beyond consciousness, must have
been true. With this thought in mind Descartes declared that being and thinking are one
and the same thing.
The Surrealists who see themselves beyond Hegel and Nietzsche intend to
overcome the Cartesian mind-body dualism, but do, and fail in achieving, that which is
almost exactly the opposite of what they intended to do. Instead of stressing the gap
between the signifier and the signified, the subject and the object, they ridiculously act
out what they say they are criticizing. Their only difference from Descartes is their
attempt to freeze the movement of thought while for Descartes there was no movement of
thought at all, the thought was always already static. While Descartes was saying, this is
one, and pointing himself out, the Surrealists are saying, this one is not the one it
appears to be.

161

Although the Surrealists borrowed the concept of pineal eye from Descartes, they
used it against him. With this pineal eye One looks outside and feels like what One sees is
inside. The distance between Ones eye and the object of vision does not exist. That
which you see on the surface of the outside is the depth of the inside. The depth of the
inside is at the same time the depth of the outside. The depths and surfaces of the insides
and outsides are one and there is no boundary of this one. This One creates its limits as
it goes beyond them. It is its crime, punishment, and prize at once. The constitution and
the breaking of the law that it writes for itself take place at the same time. The crime and
the execution of the punishment are one. The limit, the law, the wall, the borderline, the
boundary, the edge do not exist prior to the act that breaks through them. The diversions
created in and through language set the limits of what language can do to one, and what
One can do with language, to language, to the world, to oneself. One becomes an act of
contemplation in the process of opening up new passages through which language can
flow through and fill one. Full with and surrounded by language, one as language,
contemplates itself and fills itself with what it contemplates. Words flow through the
passages opened up by the movements of thought and time created by and creating new
contents of expression. The new contents of expression are at the same time new forms of
thought. The forms of thought are at the same time the contents of thought. Language
practices what it preaches. The expression and the expressed are one. Language is a sea
the shores of which are the edges of language. This, however, does not mean that there is
nothing conceivable beyond the shore. The shores and their extensions are the homes of
others ways of being in relation. And neither in nor through language can One reach that
which is beyond for there is no going beyond of language as such but as much. Language
perpetually dissolves into not nothingness but into something inconceivable. That
162

inconceivable is the void that one attempts to render conceivable as it goes along the way
in and through language and yet does the reverse of what it is aiming at.
3. Is Pineal Eye an Organ Without a Body?
The pineal eye is not the organ that turns two different perspectives into one. But
rather it attempts to turn the reality inside out so that the objects, instead of becoming
visible through reflecting light, themselves overflow their objectivities and generate light.
The Surrealists aimed at precisely this kind of a process through automatic writing. They
aimed at replacing the objective reality with another subjectivity that would go beyond
the polar opposition between the subject and the object. Surrealism tries to attain
inorganicity through becoming inorganic. It desires nothing, rather than willing
nothingness. It is a movement governed by the death drive rather than being the governor
of the death drive.
Bataille at first looked at the Surrealists with sympathy, but before long he came
to understand that it was nothing other than a false pretentiousness. Bataille says,
If we were to identify under the heading of materialism a crude
liberation of human life from the imprisonment and masked
pathology of ethics, an appeal to all that is offensive,
indestructible, and even despicable, to all that overthrows, perverts,
and ridicules spirit, we could at the same time identify surrealism
as a childhood disease of this base materialism: it is through this
latter identification that the current prerequisites for a consistent
development may be specified forcefully and in such a manner as

163

to preclude any return to pretentious idealistic aberrations. 102

To understand why Bataille is so angry with the Surrealists, and especially with
Dali, we have to go back to the roots of this distress caused by the attempt to show that
the subject and the object are one. Bataille compares the prefix Sur at the beginning of
Surrealism and Nietzsches Surhomme. For Bataille, what is common to both Nietzsche
and the Surrealists is that they both in vain strive for a higher world, and yet since
Nietzsche at least inverts his attitude and attempts to revalue all values including his own.
Whereas Surrealism is a hopeless case in that all they do is to devalue everything
valuable. For Bataille, the Surrealists are merely a group of people making themselves
ridiculous and being the objects of nervous laughter.
Bataille doesnt agree with the Surrealists understanding of beauty and meaning
in art and literature. It is true, both the Surrealists and Bataille are obsessed with turning
things upside down, turning the low into high and the high into the low. The difference
between the Surrealists and Bataille is not only aesthetic but also ethical, a stance linked
to Batailles concept of transgression as he puts it in parenthesis in his critique of
Salvador Dalis Lugubrious Game.
(If violent movements manage to rescue a being from profound
boredom, it is because they can leadthrough some obscure error
to a ghastly satiating ugliness. It must be said, moreover, that
ugliness can be hateful without any recourse and, as it were,
through misfortune, but nothing is more common than the
equivocal ugliness that gives, in a provocative way, the illusion of
102

Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, The Old Mole and the Prefix Sur in the Words
Surhomme and Surrealist, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1994), 32
164

the opposite. As for irrevocable ugliness, it is exactly as detestable

as certain beauties: the beauty that conceals nothing, the beauty
that is not the mask of ruined immodesty, the beauty that never
contradicts itself and remains eternally at attention like a
coward.)103
For Bataille what the Surrealists do is to provoke the pre-dominant authority in
such a way that can only be considered as the manifestation of ill-will. Bataille,
consciously or unconsciously, uses Nietzsche against the Surrealists although he seems to
be putting them in the same category for their aspirations to higher Ideals. Although
Bataille sees idealisation both in Surrealism and Nietzsche, he nevertheless underlines the
different means they employ to attain those higher Ideals. In both Nietzsche and the
Surrealists the unconscious is filled with archaic images of Ancient Greek Mythology, but
in Nietzsche these are adjusted to the demands of the present, whereas even in Bretons
writings we see sheer rage manifesting itself through exploitation of the death-drive in
that the process of slashing myth and language into pieces aims at attracting punishment.
What Bataille does in his Critique of Surrealism and Nietzsche is to turn the
human subject upside down and instead of idealizing higher realms he, in a way, idealizes
the lower realms. Bataille situates himself in a realm lower than the realm of the law.
By excavating the fetid ditch of bourgeois culture, perhaps
we will see open up in the depths of the earth immense and
even sinister caves where force and human liberty will
establish themselves, sheltered from the call to order of a

103

Bataille, 27
165

heaven that today demands the most imbecilic elevation of

any mans spirit.104
Batailles main target is the Icarian flight which he sees both in Nietzsche and the
Surrealists. As we know, Icarus didnt obey his fathers No, and tried to fly and touch the
sun. Eventually he burnt himself up. The Icarian conception of imagination as flight from
reality leads to an idealization of the bourgeois values disguised as the proletarian values,
and the real lower world is pushed further down. For Bataille, the reason why people see
the foot as inferior to the head is their habit of attributing a higher status to the vertical
forms of thought. Man should fall on his four legs, otherwise he will never be able to
write himself out not only as the writer but also as the written, not only as the seer but
also as the seen.
Batailles attitude reminds Lacans theory of the passage from the imaginary to
the symbolic. For Lacan the Symbolic law, the Name of the Father who says No to the
desiring child plays a dominant role in participation in the symbolic order and eventually
becoming a sexed subject who is able to distinguish between the me and the not me. In
Lacanian terms, Nietzsche and the Surrealists are locked in the mirror stage where
Descartes is a respected inmate. As Breton says, There, the atmosphere and light begin
to stir in all purity the proud uprising of unformed thoughts. Man, restored to his original
sovereignty and serenity, preaches there his own eternal truths, they say, for himself
alone.105
4. Artaud, Deleuze and the will to nothingness
I close the eyes of my intelligence and, giving voice to the
unformulated within me, I offer myself the sense of having wrested
104

Bataille, 43
Andr Breton, What is Surrealism?, ed. trans. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto,
1978), 28
105

166

from the unknown something real. I believe in spontaneous

conjurations. On the paths along which my blood draws me, it
cannot be that one day I will not discover a truth.106
Artaud does not call for destruction of reason through the imaginary but an
affirmation of reasons self-destruction on the way to self-creation. There is a knowledge
which Artaud is in pursuit of without knowing what that knowledge is and what purpose
it serves. Artaud is always in pursuit of this unattainable and ungraspable knowledge and
he knows that, as he is trying to give it a voice, he is moving away from and towards it at
the same time. This movement of the action and the intention in opposite directions, that
is, this turning against itself of desire, is a thought that Artaud feels with his body but
cannot express through articulable forms. Artaud makes the inarticulable visible through
costume, lighting, etc., and tries to create a psychic materiality.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom
then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dancehalls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.107
Artaud feels the body as an externally organized structure and experiences
existence as pain because he feels his body to be restricted and subjected to forms it is not
willing to take at all times. By disorganizing the body through putting its organs to
different uses, to uses other than they have come to be put, within the organizing
106

Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of

California, 1975), 92
107
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (University of California:
Berkeley, 1975), 570-1
167

structures, Artaud induces agony in himself. Desiring to become inorganic, and this is a
desire for an impersonal death, an ungraspable knowledge, this striving for infinity
within the finite, is, paradoxically, at once the product and the producer of his affirmation
of life as it is, that is, as a process of breaking down as the American novelist F. Scott
Fitzgerald puts it in his The Crack Up. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze reads Fitzgeralds
The Crack Up with Kleinian eyes and says that identification is peculiar to manicdepressive states. In The Crack Up Fitzgerald says,
I only wanted absolute quiet to think about why I had developed a
sad attitude toward tragedywhy I had become identified with the
objects of my horror or compassion Identification such as this
spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that
keeps insane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure
the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor
Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such
merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake
and a failure108
Deleuze affirms Fitzgeralds manic-depressive attitude towards the relationship
between life and death in the Porcelain and Volcano chapter of his The Logic of Sense.
If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable,
it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges
thought occurs, that anything that is good and great in humanity
enters and exits through it, in people ready to destroy themselves
better death than the health which we are given. Is there some
other health, like a body surviving as long as possible its scar, like
108

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up (New York: New Directions, 1945), 69

168

Lowry dreaming of rewriting a Crack Up which would end

happily, and never giving up the idea of a new vital conquest?109
In a world ruled by fools full of ill-will war becomes inescapable. Since war,
conflict, violence and destruction are interior as much as they are exterior affairs, it is
hardly a matter of bad luck that we will be wounded at some point if we havent been
already, not that I wish it to be that way. An injury either creates a possibility of relating
to the world as it is, or turns into an obsession with the self, into a delusional and rigid
vision of existence projected onto the real, giving birth to neurosis or psychosis.
We do not write with our neuroses. Neuroses or psychoses are not
passages of life, but states into which we fall when the process is
interrupted, blocked, or plugged up. Illness is not a process but a
stopping of the process, as in the Nietzsche case. Moreover, the
writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician
of himself and of the world. The world is a set of symptoms whose
illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of
health.110
If we have a look at the Nietzsche case once again with Kleinian eyes through a
Deleuzean looking glass we see that the mechanism of projection-introjection is itself the
illness of which resentment and bad conscience are the causes and the symptoms at the
same time. In the case of projection the subjects illness is manifested as aggressiveness
and hostility towards the external world, always accusing the others for his weaknesses.
This is the paranoiac who is afraid of being persecuted and sees the external world as a
109

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, (London:
Continuum, 2003),
110
Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, transl.Daniel W. Smith and Michale A.
Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 3
169

threat to his unity. Afraid of the external world, he himself becomes hostile towards it in
turn provoking hostility against himself, thus giving birth to the actualisation of what he
was afraid of. And in the case of introjection the subject internalises the fault and turns
against itself. This is the psychotic who identifies with everything and everyone, and who
has too many points of view together with a divergent coherency of thought and action.
Intending to take a spoon from the drawer he might break a plate on the floor. In the first
case there is a detached hostility and in the second case there is an immersed attachment.
In both cases the subject becomes the victim of his own actions against and toward
himself and others.
Nietzsche says that the will to nothingness eventually turns against itself and
becomes creative and revalues all values to survive death. 111 It is through writing as the
patient and the physician, as the analyst and the analysand at the same time that Nietzsche
is able to turn resentment, bad conscience, fear, and guilt against themselves and produce
desire as affirmation of the world as it is after a conflict that is interior as much as it is
exterior to the self. This conflict is the crack up that happens to the body of the organism.
It is neither interior nor exterior, but a surface event.
There was a silent, imperceptible crack, at the surface, a unique
surface Event. It is as if it were suspended or hovering over itself,
flying over its own field. The real difference is not between the
inside and the outside, for the crack is neither internal nor external,
but is rather at the frontier.112

111

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and

Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 116-8
112

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, (London:
Continuum, 2003), 155
170

It was on and through his disorganized body, or body without organs, that Artaud
traversed the realm of affective intensities and the field of partial objects and produced
desire without an object. For Deleuze the process of traversing the affective intensities
felt through body rather than grasped by the mind may be the returning of a great
health. Here objects are related to in such a way as to produce desire not as lack but as
production. For Deleuze it is the production of fantastic visions of the world that are the
causes and effects of certain pathological conditions. Bombarded with unattainable
objects of desire the subject becomes mad.
In both Freud and Lacan the attitude toward the object of desire is Platonic in that
the object of desire is the object of desire as long it remains unattainable. To put it in
Lacanian terms, with the acquisition of language the subject starts to enter the symbolic
order and loses touch with the Real which is the unconscious. His desires and drives are
shaped and organized according to the Symbolic order of the language game in which he
finds himself. So the direction the subjects becoming will take depends not only on the
way in which the subject relates to language but also how he relates the unconscious to
language, since it is ones production of a sense of oneness for oneself in and through
language that determines ones way of being in relation to language. Language is neither
internal nor external to the subject and yet it is equally internal and external to the subject
since language is the surface in-between. Beyond language there is nothing. Deleuze
observes a movement of language towards its outside, not to reach the outside of
language, but to create an outside language within language in writers such as Kafka,
Beckett, and later Kerouac(The Subterraneans, Big Sur). For Deleuze, their subversions
of syntax become their passage through the fleshy transparency of signification unless the
process of production through the unconscious forces of the outside is blocked.
171

All writing involves an athleticism, but far from reconciling

literature with sports, or turning writing into an Olympic event, this
athleticism is exercised in flight and in the breakdown of the
organic bodyan athlete in bed, as Michaux put it.113
Deleuze sees the goal of literature as giving a voice to those unconscious forces
that belong to a realm outside of language and those forces can only be given a voice by
creating an impersonal consciousness through a new language within language - an
outside language inside the language - that traverses the field of partial representations of
the human condition and produces an other sign that is itself at once internally exterior
and externally interior to the major order of signification. The outside of language is the
realm which Deleuze calls the transcendental field of immanence. It is through this
synthesis of transcendence and immanence that Deleuze is theoretically able to touch the
material through the psychic, and the real through the fantasy. But the problem persists,
for the question remains: how are we going to practice this theory? Is it practical enough
to be applied to the banalities of ordinary life?
In his book, On Deleuze and Consequences, Zizek bases his critique of Deleuze
on his use of Artauds concept of the body without organs. As is clearly understood from
the subtitle of his book, Organs Without Bodies, Zizeks aim is to reverse the Deleuzean
order of things. With his well known 180 degrees reversals, Zizek uses Deleuzes idea of
a resistance to Oedipalization against him, and that way shows that Deleuzes assumption
that Oedipalization is something to be resisted is based on false premises. For Zizek,
Oedipalization takes place when and if there is a failure in the system. Zizek considers
Anti-Oedipus to be a book in which Deleuze and Guattari situate a psychotic and an
113

Gilles Deleuze, Essays: Critical and Clinical, transl. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A.
Greco (Verso: London and New York, 1998), 2
172

Oedipalized subject on the opposite poles of one another. For Zizek a psychotic is the
Oedipalized subject par excellence, rather than being an anti-Oedipe who escapes the
codes of capitalist axiomatics.
[] far from tying us down to our bodily reality, symbolic
castration sustains our very ability to transcend this reality and
enter the space of immaterial becoming. Does the autonomous
smile that survives on its own when the cats body disappears in
Alice in Wonderland also not stand for an organ castrated, cut off
from the body? What if, then, phallus itself, as the signifier of
castration, stands for such an organ without a body?114
What for Deleuze is traversing the symbolic becomes traversing the fantasy in
Lacan as Zizek pointed out first in The Sublime Object of Ideology and later in The
Ticklish Subject. Traversing the fantasy is a stage in the process of progress and it is only
upon entry into the symbolic that the subject becomes capable of initiating change in the
symbolic order. In Lacans mirror stage where a series of imaginary Narcissistic
identifications prepares the subject for the symbolic order, the child has an illusory sense
of oneness and yet this illusion is necessary only in so far as the child will traverse this
fantasy and will have learned to look at the world without identification.
A detachment from identification is common to both Deleuze and Zizek and in
this sense they are both Lacanians. Lacan is the one that unites them as he splits them.
For Deleuze the Lacanian symbolic is that in which the subject finds itself upon birth, so
to initiate change the subject should try to introduce an exterior inside, a new language
within language. Deleuze tries to put language in touch with a pre-verbal, if not pre114

Slavoj iek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London:
Routledge, 2004), 83

173

linguistic stage. It is to Kleins paranoid-schizoid position that Deleuze attributes

importance. Deleuze takes the schizoid part of the paranoid-schizoid position and extracts
from schizophrenia all apart from introjection and splitting processes. Following Klein
Deleuze makes a distinction between introjection and identification. According to
Deleuze introjection and splitting are useful tools for creating difference, whereas
identification not only preserves but also serves the system. Zizek agrees with him on the
usefulness of introjection and splitting. In both cases the revolutionary-becoming is
associated with the death drive. But Zizek disagrees with Deleuzes association of
introjection and splitting with schizophrenia.
For Zizek there must be a distance between reason and non-reason. One should
not try to name the unnamable, but rather one must show the nothingness outside
everything, to do this one must introduce a split into the symbolic continuity of things.
An interruption of the system from within is the aim of both Zizek and Deleuze, and yet
while Zizek affirms non-representability of the unconscious, Deleuze sees the
unconscious as the producer of difference and initiator of change. For Deleuze the
unconscious is dynamic, but for Zizek it is static and it is this static state outside time that
manifests itself in the form of gaps within the symbolic order; it splits and interrupts the
flow of things, rather than participate in it.
What does Oedipalisation mean? It means the production of a subject who would
willingly blind himself to the social reality. Who would rather see nothing rather than see
the truth. An Oedipalised subject is he who blinds himself to the symbolic meaning of
things and chooses to see the nothingness before or after the symbolic. It is the symbolic
that Oedipus represses by blinding himself to it. That he has engaged in sexual
intercourse with his mother and killed his father, induces such guilt in Oedipus that he
174

punishes himself by cutting himself off from the external world. This Oedipal
introversion of the subject leads to a weakening rather than a strengthening of the
subjects fantasy world. With the exclusion of reality, fantasy has nothing to mediate.
Unconscious drives cannot attach themselves to external objects so as to turn into desire.
Left hanging in the air the unconscious drives turn against the subject and the subject
becomes self-destructive, blinding himself to the symbolic, thus opening himself up to
the nothingness behind it by choosing to see nothing. An Oedipal subject closes his eyes
and seeing the nothingness inside says there is nothing outside. He is Nietzsches man, as
he puts at the beginning and the end of On The Genealogy of Morality, who would much
rather will nothingness than not will. For he still wills, otherwise he wouldnt want to
blind himself to it all. It is because he cannot help willing although he doesnt want to
will that his will turns against itself and wills nothingness rather than something to stand
in for it.
It is Nietzsches legacy to have made a distinction between the subject and the
signifier, knowledge and truth. By exposing the absence of an origin of knowledge he
exposed the absence of truth in knowledge. Nietzsche inverted into the spotlight the
nothingness inherent in knowledge which is constitutive of a truth outside scientific
knowledge. Truth can take many forms and one of these is poetic truth, which Nietzsche
considers to be closer to the absolute truth, which is the truth of the absence of truth at the
center of scientific knowledge.
For Nietzsche there is no relation whatsoever between the object of knowledge
and the truth of experience. Perhaps what Deleuze would years later call transcendental
empiricism explains the production of truths alternative to the scientific truth which
claims to be objective and absolute. For Deleuze literary activity involves creation of
175

impersonal consciousnesses within the subject of writing. The subject of writing should
detach himself/herself from the object of writing; that is, the writer should make a
distinction between the enunciated and the subject of enunciation. As Deleuze puts it in
his essay, Life and Literature, literature is not a personal affair. Literature is not about
writing down ones personal experiences as they actually took place, which is impossible
anyway. Literature involves selecting from experience and giving form to formless
experience which is yet to take the shape of new forms of experience. Out of the old
experience one creates new experience.
The writer turns unnameable drives into new symbolic meanings and new objects
of desire. With Deleuze the unconscious is given a very important role to play in the
process of cultural production. The non-symbolizable drives interacting with one another
and forming what is called the unconscious are turned into comprehensible and desirable
forms through literature. Literature contributes to the symbolic order by producing not
only new symbolic meanings of the already existing objects but also new objects which
didnt previously exist within the symbolic order.

Literature, therefore, turns the

unconscious drive into the symbolic desire. So Deleuze could say the unconscious
produces desire. Literature is about turning the pre-verbal -- if not pre-linguistic -- objects
into verbal objects with symbolic meanings attached to them. Literature constructs a
world in which the objects gain new significance.
5. Artaud and The Shaman
A shaman is he who makes the patient identify with himself through the use of
certain devices which activate the unconscious. The shaman takes the patient on a
journey through himself; he plays the role of the mediator between the symbolic and the
real. The shaman populates the unconscious with monsters and evil creatures, in other
176

words with bad objects, and teaches the patient to struggle with them. In a way what a
shaman does is to traverse the fantasy and take the patient with himself/herself to the
realm after the fantasy is traversed. Once the fantasy is traversed his/her unconscious
drives start to make sense for the patient. The shamans therapeutic procedure, therefore,
involves reattaching the patient to the signifying chain, by giving him/her objects to
represent his suffering. To be attacked by a monster with flames coming out of its mouth
stands in for the unnamable internal bad object. For a shaman the most important thing
in therapy is to help the patient get in touch with the unconscious which is populated by
mythological monsters. What a shaman actually does is to invite projective identification
and show the way out of the field of partial bad objects. At the end of the journey the
patient becomes capable of seeing a continuity in his life and therefore gains a sense of
illusory oneness.
Artaud was deeply involved in finding ways of manipulating the unconscious.
Just like a shaman Artaud aimed at directly communicating with the spectators
unconscious. To achieve this Artaud advocated the use of physical objects in the way of
touching the psyche. Artauds materialism paradoxically transcends the physical. The
concept of the Theatre of Cruelty implies a cruelty on the psyche through the affective
use of the physical objects on the stage. These included, audio and visual imagery,
costumes resembling slashed open bodies, unorthodox lighting, unnamable voices
coming from nowhere, representing pain. Artauds attitude was so aggressive that he even
surpassed the Surrealists. Although at the beginning he was close to the Surrealist
movement, and he carried the project of automatic writing to its limits in his poems,
Artaud was soon expelled from the Surrealist movement. For Artaud they were only

177

game players rather than actors. They failed in acting upon the world and fell victim to
their pursuit of a superior realm beyond the physical.
Artauds vision is a much more materialist one than that of Surrealists who
populated the unconscious with figures from Ancient Greek Mythology. For Artaud
Bretons literary and theoretical texts were not radical enough, they could even be
considered conventional. Artauds objective was to dissociate the spectator from the
social reality and make it impossible for him/her not to associate himself with the action
on the stage. In a way, Artaud wanted to take the spectator into the act, rather than
merely play a solipsistic game excluding the role of the spectator. Artaud showed the
third eye between the eye seeing the inside and the eye looking outside. For Artaud
identification is the key to the heart and the soul of the spectator, for identification
process surpasses rational thought. For Artaud even the breathing of the actor is important
to create affective intensities.
[] (Breathing) allows the spectator to identify himself
with the performance breath by breath, and bar by bar
All emotion has organic bases. It is in cultivating his
emotion in his body that the actor recharges the density of
its voltage. Knowing in advance which parts of the body
one wants to touch means putting the spectator into magic
trances.115
Artaud was trying to find a means to affect the spectator. He expected the actors
to act in such a way as to invite projective identification just like a shaman. Artaud gave
obscure directions such as retain breath as you speak, or your voice should be in your
115

Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California, 1975), 163

178

head as you speak, to the actors. His goal was to make the pain manifest itself. The
spectator was immersed in the action to such an extent that even his/her
breathings(exhalations and inhalations) became one with those of the actors. Through
sustaining the conditions for the possibility of total projective identification Artaud
strived to render the action, the audience, and actor one; the real intent was to erase the
boundary between life and theatre. For Artaud there is no good object in life and theatre
should show nothing but that.
6. Beckett
Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be,
what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this saying its me?
Answer simply. Its the same old stranger as ever, for existence, of
his, of ours, theres a simple answer. Its not with thinking he will
find me, but what is he to do, living and bewildered, yes, living,
say what he may.116
Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost
restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and Im far again.
With a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to
end, and again this voice cannot be mine. Thats where I would go,
if I could go, thats who I would be, if I could be.117
In Texts For Nothing the narrative voice turns its resentment in the face of having
no-identity, that is, for being incapable of changing the course of events in the way of
having an identity, and prefers not to will at all, to will nothing, rather than will
nothingness. Beckett conforms to Nietzsches famous saying about Nihilism: man would
116
117

Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing (London: John Calder, 1999), 22

Beckett, 24-25
179

much rather will nothingness than not will. This is not an impoverishment of the will,
rather, it is itself a will to nothing which turns Becketts writing into a motionless flight, a
static genesis, and at the same time a movement of thought which spirals around and
within nothing, in the process turning the absence of something conceivable into a neutral
voice through which silence eternally speaks and engages in a non-identical relation with
the world surrounding it.
In Waiting for Godot there is nothing at the centre of the subject; no one comes,
no one goes, nothing takes place. That place is the side of a road where there is a barren
tree, and there Vladimir and Estragon share an aloneness, an intimacy. They give the
impression that they have been there for hundreds, or even thousands of years,
associating by their clothes with Charlie Chaplins persona, the universal vagabond.
Vladimir: [] To all mankind they were addressed, those
cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at
this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it
or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let
us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a
cruel fate consigned us. [] But that is not the question.
What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are
blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in
this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are
waiting for Godot to come--118
In Waiting for Godot Beckett continues his project of purgation, or purification
through reduction of life to its bare bones. According to Alain Badiou, as he puts it in his
118

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber
and Faber, 1990), 74
180

book On Beckett, to achieve this reduction of life and truth to their most naked forms, in
his novels Beckett had to write thousands of pages in the way of wiping the slate clean
and getting rid of the non-generic details of daily social life. To open up a space within
the existing order Beckett had to unwrite the symbolic order in the way of subtracting the
Symbolic from the Real. By situating Vladimir and Estragon in the middle of now-here,
which he shows to be nothingness, Beckett gives voice to the Real of being, which is
non-being. Beckett shows that at the centre of the subject there is a hole. The split
introduced by Beckett in-between the subject and the signifier shows the subject and the
signifier as constituted by a lack of a third party outside them. There is the absence of
something in-between the fantasy and the social reality and the subject is this non-being
constituted through and as the gap separating them. The subject is an effect of language,
and yet this effect manifests itself only in the form of gaps, absences, cuts. That is, the
subject manifests itself only in the form of a negativity from the perspective of the big
Other. For the big Other excludes nothingness and death. The big Other wants subjects
that are something within the symbolic order.
What Alain Badiou has written about Becketts writing at the time of Texts for
Nothing becomes relevant here.
With extraordinary lucidity, they tell us of the nothingness
of the attempt in progress. They come to the realisation, not
that there is nothing (Beckett will never be a nihilist), but
that writing has nothing more to show for itself. These texts
tell us the truth of a situation, that of Beckett at the end of
the fifties: what he has written up to that point cant go on.
It is impossible to go on alternating, without any mediation
181

whatsoever, between the neutrality of the grey black of

being and the endless torture of the solipsistic cogito.
Writing can no longer sustain itself by means of this
alternation.119
It is in this context that Becketts Texts For Nothing, Waiting for Godot and
Lacans theory of the subject coincide. At the root of this coincidence is a shared way of
being in relation to the unconscious and death.
After being subjected to purgatory in his novels, Murphy, Watt, Moran, Molloy,
Malone and Mahood are finally shown to be the embodiments of a split subject
constituted by two clowns who have no role to play, their selves separate from their
consciousnesses, talking to but not with one another. Vladimir and Estragon are both no
one and everyone, none of the existing things and yet all that there is left.
The relationship between Vladimir and Estragon is in the form of a conversation
with no centre, for both of the subjects of this conversation are constitutive of one
another. The gap that separates them is the constitutive non-relation between them.
Beckett has taken almost all the measures required to concretely present the journey of
being in time as being outside time. It is from Vladimir and Estragons perspectives that
we see the nothingness outside the frozen image of two vagabonds in their immobility. It
is from this gap that new thought emerges; out of this nothingness arises a generic
multiplicity. Beckett stages this generic multiplicity by employing the asymmetrically
dialectical encounter with the other. To do this he had to remove the character
configuration and logical plot development, if not the pattern, from the scene of theatre.
Reduced to their minimal needs the Beckettian characters confront the symbolic order
119

Alain Badiou, On Beckett, ed. and trans. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power
(Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003) 15
182

and challenge the immutability of Cartesian discourse. Of the One, there is almost
nothing left in Becketts work.
Man has nothing left to say and yet if he stops saying this nothingness the sublime
objects will fill the unconscious and occupy a space that should remain empty. Vladimir
and Estragon know that although they are not integral parts of each other they
nevertheless cannot do without one another. They are doomed to share this irreconcilable
and endless movement against themselves. As they speak they are moving further away
from their intended meaning, and yet if they ever stopped saying words they would be
immediately in touch with the Real which would be inordinately painful.
The Real of desire is a mystery even to the subject which can only be spoken
around and yet never about; this nothingness at the centre of the subject should remain
unoccupied for the subject to survive trauma and get free of the past. Freedom cannot be
freedom if it is not experienced as a forced-choice. For freedom is the right not to choose
to do something; saying, This is not it! And yet what is there to do but choose the least
worse of all the alternatives. And rather than not will, for that would be total destruction
for them, Vladimir and Estragon choose to will nothingness; as empty shells they shall
remain free of the symbolic order by introducing a split between one another, within
themselves, and between themselves and the social reality.
Whats at stake in Becketts project is finding the ways and the means of
presenting a time outside time, another space, something unnamable outside the existing
symbolic order. Becketts meaning is very fragile and it is precisely this fragility that
makes a new beginning possible. Governed by the death drive the subject splits the given
unities and continuities, introduces splits between the past and the present, and out of this
tireless and yet exhausted activity of splitting new signs, signs of other signs, emerge.
183

Vladimir: [] Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the

hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We
have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. [He
listens.] But habit is a great deadener. [He looks again at
estragon.] At me too someone is looking, of me too
someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let
him sleep on. [Pause.] I cant go on! [Pause.] What have
I said?120
Pozzo: [Suddenly furious.] Have you not done tormenting me with
your accursed time! Its abominable! When! When! One
day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day,
one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day hell
go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, in the
same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?
[Calmer.] They give birth astride of a grave, the light
gleams an instant, then its night once more. [He jerks the
rope.] On!121
Only in one single instant all is lived and died. But this single instant takes a
lifetime to pass. For Beckett its end comes when one confronts death. The characters in
his Trilogy, Molloy, Malone, and finally the Unnamable, are all narrating their processes
of deterioration, they are trying to give a voice to that time-space where it all ends and yet
something other than the all of life in the symbolic order begins. Beckett writes how
subject and the death-drive overlap. But he writes this event in such a way that this
120

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, The Complete Dramatic Works, (London: Faber
and Faber, 1986), 84-5
121
Beckett, Waiting For Godot, 83
184

overlapping of the subject and the death-drive turns into a life force and splits the given
unities including the Cogito. After all is said and done away with there emerges the notall, that which remains after all is said. To say this not-all one has to expose the void
within the symbolic order, to show that this void is constitutive of the symbolic order, and
that without it all meaning would collapse. What happens in Beckett, therefore, is the
process of self-deconstruction which shows the inconsistencies within the text and uses
these inconsistencies against the intended meaning of the text. In Beckett we see that in
the place of the transcendental signifier there is nothing. The subject is portrayed empty
and the subject becomes a signified itself, an empty signifier, a signifier that signifies
nothing but is itself signified. So where there was the transcendental signifier now there
is nothing. As itself a signifier. We can see how it becomes possible to say the
unconscious is a signifier, or as Lacan would say, the unconscious is structured like
language.
7. Krapps Last Tape
It is a characteristic of Becketts plays to give the impression that there is nothing
outside the stage. In Becketts plays God is never allowed to die altogether, but rather
God is made to be felt by the audience as his absence, as the nothingness outside the
stage. Krapp's Last Tape is a good example of this recurring presence of God as an
absence in Becketts plays. It is very rare not to have a couple, or more than one couple in
Becketts plays, and Krapp's Last Tape comes especially handy as a Beckett play with a
single individual in it; locked in the past and trying to figure out not only how he has
become what he is, but also why he is in general. There is no concern at all with the
future in Krapp's Last Tape, unlike Endgame for instance, where Hamm and Clov,
although they dont seek salvation from misery, they at least, just like in Waiting for
185

Godot, expect a message from without, from some unknown external source about which
they know nothing as to its relation to their future. They do strive for the unattainable
knowledge of the nothingness outside. It is as though all their thoughts, actions, and
speeches are governed by the nothingness off the stage. Whereas in Krapps Last Tape
there is no sign of will, rather than willing nothingness, Krapp prefers not to will at all.
The tape recorder is the projection-introjection machine in Krapps Last Tape.
Krapp is now introjecting what he had projected over the years, likewise the tape recorder
is projecting what it had introjected over the years. This change of roles between machine
and man reflects a perhaps often-neglected aspect of Becketts work, that aspect being the
ambivalence of Becketts relation to projection-introjection mechanisms as exemplified
by the tape recorder in Krapps Last Tape. Krapp oscillates between rejecting the past and
affirming it.
During the sixties we see Becketts plays getting shorter and shorter, and the
subject deprived of the unity of mind and body, the conscious self and the unconscious.
Becketts progressively shortens the text and moves towards theatrical, or visual
expression. The characters experience on the stage is limited to people once able to live
dramas and capable of remembering those dramas. Dispersal of the subject,
disappearance of the body, the subjects reduced to bodies in jars, to a mouth, or merely a
voice, are some of the characteristics of Becketts final period of writing. Now his
characters are no more capable of doing anything other than trying to remember those
days in which they could still express their thoughts and feelings on stage.122

122

Linel Abel, Metatheatre (New York: Hill and Wang), 82

186

At the beginning of Krapps Last Tape Beckett announces that it is a late evening
in the future. Krapps Den. Front centre a small table, facing front, i.e. across from the
drawers, a wearish old man: Krapp.123
Krapp is an old and lonely man. He is shown on his 69 th birthday listening to tapes
he had recorded on his previous birthdays. As usual he will listen to the tapes and then
record his voice telling what happened throughout last year. Krapp is the analyst and the
analysand at the same time. He listens to his past from his own mouth through the
speakers. The play opens with Krapp who has always lived alone, reducing his life to a
few physical actions carried out in a ritualistic way. This is Krapps daily routine; a few
meaningless actions. Sometimes Krapp goes inside and drinks, eats a few bananas, takes
a few steps in his den, and as he says, he sleeps with the old bitch who comes around
once in a while.
Krapp lives his life neither by writing his mind games as Molloy and Malone do,
nor talks as Hamm and Clov do. Krapp has no memory at all. Besides, he does not
construct stories for himself. His tapes are his memory. But like all the other Beckett
characters engaged in a play of consciousness Krapp deconstructs his story by using the
rewind, play, and f.forward buttons. All that remains is a mass of misery pieces of which
are not even imperfectly remembered, a multitude of unrelated and disconnected thoughts
and impressions about the past.
Throughout the play we watch the three stages of Krapps life. The most
important stage is the one narrated by the voice of Krapp at 39. The tape he recorded at
the age of 39 contemplates the tape that he had recorded at 29, and Krapp at the age of 29

123

Samuel Beckett, Krapps Last Tape, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and
Faber, 1986), 215
187

contemplates the period corresponding to his youth. And all the past periods of his life are
judged by Krapp at the age of 69, which is the present.
Krapp at the age of 29 looks down on his youth and at times mocks himself for
being the way he was. He is very happy to have done with that earlier period of his life.
That Krapp at the age of 39 does not remember that he used to sing shows that he does
not want to remember those unhappy days of childhood and adolescence. Krapp at the
age of 29 is at a stage in his life where he has to make choices and decide what to do with
his life. (This is matter of laughter for Krapp at the ages of 39 and 69).
One of the most important decisions Krapp has to make is the one concerning
breaking his habit of drinking and giving up alcohol. At this stage we see young Hamm
from Endgame meeting Krapp. Krapp tells his story using numbers and statistical
information. A numerical exactitude in his narration is clearly discernible. One other
important decision that Krapp has made at 29 is about reducing the intensity of his sexual
life. Perhaps that is why he broke up with Bianca. (However, Biancas loving gaze is
remembered by Krapp even when he is 39). Krapps 29 th year passes in search of
happiness and eventual frustrations. 29 years old Krapps tape ends with a call to God to
show himself? To this call to God Krapp at 39 (on the tape) and 69 (on the stage) laugh.
According to Krapp at 39, from that miserable year there is nothing left apart from that
lost lover.
In Endgame Hamm and Clov are the father and son repelled and yet attracted by
one another at the same time. They can do nothing with or without one another, or they
can neither do, nor not do anything with and without one another.
The stage decoration is such that considering the on-stage activity as taking place
within a head is easy and helps to understand what Beckett and we with him are dealing
188

with here. The portrait hanging on the wall is turned towards the wall and the two
windows facing the external world are sufficient signs to associate the stage as the inside
of a mans head, with the spectators watching the play from behind the split open head.
This is signified by the portrait of the father on the wall looking towards the wall with the
nothing behind the picture turned towards the stage and the spectators. At some point in
the play Clov even attempts to communicate with the spectators, he turns towards and
addresses the spectators, which shows us that Beckett was trying to make this point
clearer by making the audience aware of the inverted projection-introjection mechanism
that they are caught in. In all his plays and novels, one way or another, Beckett achieves
inverting the projection-introjection mechanism into the spotlight. And he achieves this
precisely by putting under a magnifying glass the failures within the projectionintrojection mechanism.
What Beckett wants to say by employing these unorthodox techniques in theatre
is simple and yet sophisticated. He wants to say that to escape from the Cartesian mindbody dualism and the mechanistic view of the world associated with it one has to create
an imbalance between the projecting side and the introjecting side, between apprehension
and comprehension.
The creation of imbalance can take the form of either an excessive projection of
the imaginary and the symbolic onto the real, or a lack of projection resulting in total
introjection. In the first case the subject loses himself in the chaos of the real, and in the
second case the subject loses touch with the real and becomes a totally imaginary and
symbolic construction. In both cases there is a loss of gap between the imaginary and the
symbolic. And when the imaginary and the symbolic become one the real in-between
them becomes impossible to be in touch with. In Dissymetries Badiou repeatedly and
189

recreatively points out that Beckett is not divided into two but into three. To use Derridas
words, one plus one makes at least three.

Intermediation 3
In the previous chapter we have seen how the Uncosncious has been put to use in
literary creativity by various movements. In this time of fragmentation and loss of
oneness, the stable identity is replaced by a subject who embodies the life drive and the
death drive in a state of conflict with one another which causes inordinate anxiety in the
subject as a result of the antagonism producing structure of the pre-dominant symbolic
order. And this subjectivity is as yet not capable of investigating the source of its inner
conflict for fear is continually instilled in the subject through the capillaries of the predominant symbolic order. Unless we realize that it is the fear of death that lies at the heart
of this anxiety we cannot come to terms with death and reconcile ourselves to life. Once
the subject comes to terms with death and is reconciled to life, it becomes possible for the
190

subjects critique of the existing social order to subsist within the intersubjective field
beyond objectivity and subjectivity. I think this critique would be much more effective
than the one that is directed, at all costs, against the external world in general.
If people think about the same subject with the same words all the time, then they
are using the same part of their brains in the same way at all times. This means that while
many neurons in their brains remain unused, inactive for a long period of time, always
and only the same neurons interact in the same way all the time. Needless to say in time
stupidity and narrow-mindedness dominate their thought processes. To solve the problem
of narrow-mindedness a sort of short circuit between the neurons is required. In the next
chapter I shall attempt to show how literature helps to break down the already existing
neural connections and form new neural and synaptic connections in the brain.

CHAPTER VI: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma

I philosophise only in terror, but in the confessed terror of going mad.124

Jacques Derrida.

The circle of the eternal return is a circle which is always excentric in

relation to an always decentered center.125
Gilles Deleuze.

124

Jacques Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness, from Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 76
125
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed.
Constantin V. Boundas (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 264
191

1. Architecture of The White Hotel

Published in 1981, D.M. Thomas The White Hotel is a post-structuralist novel
which employs parody to expose the absences of meaning inherent in itself. In Prologue
D.M. Thomas gives the impression that he is publishing the real letters written by Freud
and his friends. Written in the form of a documentary this part is followed by a surrealist
poem giving voice to Lisa Erdmans dreams and fantasies. Here we look at the world
with the eyes of a young man and a young woman. They have no identities, their world is
not separated from themselves, and nothing is categorized. There everything can turn into
something else including its opposite, everything is replaceable with another thing, and
everything is intermingled, no distinction is made between internal and external objects:
Stars fall from the sky like rain, trees mix with the sea, young woman turns into
Magdalene, and drinks the wind. The consciousness and the body of the man and the
woman become one with the universe in this Surrealist poem. In this first chapter the gap
between what is real and what is not is filled, the boundary between the fictional and
social reality is erased, and a fantastic vision of the world is presented. In the part
following this poetic part the same events are narrated in prose employing the techniques
of the symbolists and abstract expressionists.
The third chapter is the case study of Lisa Erdman, aka Frau Anna. Frau Annas
illness and the therapeutic process are narrated in such a way as to give the impression
that we are reading Freuds notebook. The language of this chapter is scientific and
conforms to the norms of scientific objectivity. There are occasional footnotes and
scientific documents. It is only through a footnote that the reader is given a hint that all
this is actually fictional and has nothing to do with what has actually happened. In this
footnote it said that Freuds notebook containing the case studies was burnt in 1933. If the
192

text is based on facts so too must the footnote be based on facts; so what we have been
reading cannot be Freuds own writing. In other words the text is not taking itself
seriously, the text is deconstructing itself, shifting the ground beneath his feet and
eventually collapsing in on itself. The text negates what it claims to be the truth and turns
into a parody of itself.
In the fourth chapter all the forms and contents of narrative in the previous
chapter are brought together under the roof of traditional and realistic forms of writing.
Events are situated in their proper historical contexts and are presented linearly with all
the cause-effect relationships in order. The characters are presented in accordance with
the symbolic order and show signs of progress in time. In this context science, art, and
life seem to be interconnected and the reader is given the impression that rational
discourse on them and their relationship with each other is possible.
The fifth chapter is almost exactly the opposite of the second chapter. The subject
who had become one with the universe and was continually changing in harmony with
nature in the second chapter, becomes the subject of death, alienation, trauma, and
separation. This chapter is about the Ukrainian Jews who thought they were being taken
to Jerusalem by train, but soon found themselves naked and about to be killed. Lisa is
among these Ukrainian Jews. Alienation, detachment, instability, human destroying
human, fear and violence are all analyzed in terms of their relations to death and
nothingness. The narrative form is mostly naturalistic, and yet touched by a little bit of
symbolism here and there.
The sixth and the last chapter of The White Hotel resembles the second chapter in
that it is composed of dream-visions. Here all events and all sensations are accepted

193

without questioning, and even without comprehension. This unmediated knowledge is

articulated through a surrealistic narrative.
As a whole The White Hotel is an attempt to find a way of expressing the trauma
of the Holocaust. In his The Holocaust and The Literary Imagination, Lawrence Langer
investigates the representability of the traumatic experiences and their effects.
How should art how can art? represent the inexpressibly
inhuman suffering of the victims, without doing an
injustice to that suffering? If art, as Adorno concedes, is
perhaps the last remaining sanctuary where that suffering
can be paid honest homage, enshrining it permanently in
the imagination of the living as the essential horror that it
was, the danger also exists of this noble intention sliding
into the abyss of its opposite.126
For Langer, trying to represent the Holocaust invites the negation of the real
situation by tranquilizing the reader with a kind of aesthetic sublimation resulting in
temporary satisfaction. So the writer should find a suitably disturbing form to be able to
make the reader feel the pain of the suffering. The writer should aim at such a way of
expression as to disturb the reader, rather than provide him/her with fetish objects to
stand in for the Real of the Holocaust. The Real may be unattainable, it may be that
which is non-symbolizable, the unnameable truth of what really happened, and yet
splitting the narrative, interrupting the continuity, dissolving the structure, may
themselves turn out to be the very qualities that render it possible for the reader to touch
the Real without really touching it.
126

Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and The Literary Imagination (London: Yale
University Press, 1975), 1
194

In The White Hotel we only glimpse at the extent of loss and get a sense of the
inordinate measure of suffering involved in traumatic experiences.
The mind resists what it feels to be imaginatively valid but
wants to disbelieve; and the task of the artist is to find a
style and a form to present the atmosphere or landscape of
atrocity, to make it compelling, to coax the reader into
credulity and ultimately, complicity. The fundamental
task of the critic is not to ask whether it should or can be
done, since it already has been, but to evaluate how it has
been done, judge its effectiveness, and analyse its
implications for literature and society.127
How can you make someone feel the others pain through language, especially
when this pain is unnameable? For Langer identification is necessary for ethical action.
So the writer should find the proper way of saying what he means to say, in such a way as
to create the conditions of possibility for the readers identification with the character.
Langer thinks that making the reader identify with the holocaust victims invites ethical
questioning of the situation. Langer seems to be blind to what is really at work in an
identification process.
The Real, the traumatic kernel resists signification, it is an irruption which exists
in the form of an absence. Creating gaps within the text itself helps to create the effects of
absence and loss on the reader. But there is also a negative aspect of producing absence
of meaning and presence of obscurity in the text. The writer may find himself/herself
inviting projective identification with his/her characters. Creating absences of meaning
within the text does not always alienate the reader from the text, quite the opposite may
127

Langer, 22
195

be the case; it leaves spaces within the text onto which the reader can project his/her
narcissistic image of self.
It is only in the shape of such novels as The White Hotel that we can reconcile
ourselves to being caught up in an irresolvable conflict-situation between the life drive
and the death drive. It is this antagonism inherent in the human condition itself that
fascism exploited, and has not ceased to exploit in the way not only of murdering masses,
but also of making the masses murder themselves and one another.
At a first glance The White Hotel looks like a poetic novel about the Jewish
Holocaust feeding on the mythological imagery of psychoanalysis. In the Authors Note,
D.M. Thomas says,
One could not travel far in the landscape of hysteria the terrain of
this novel without meeting the majestic figure of Sigmund Freud.
Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer
of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By
myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and
in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the
scientific validity of psychoanalysis.128
The Prologue of The White Hotel is composed of five letters written by Freud,
Sandor Ferenczi, his lover Gisela, and Sachs. The first letter is written by Ferenczi to his
lover Gisela on 8th September 1909. In this letter Ferenczi talks about his feelings and
fantasies and as he does this he mentions the disagreement between Freud and Jung.
According to Ferenczi, Jung has interpreted one of Freuds dreams in such a way as to
cause anxiety in Freud. And upon this Freud said to Jung that he would never ever give
any information to him about his personal life. What Thomas does in the third chapter to
128

D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel (London: Victor Gollancz, 1981), 6

196

criticize Freud becomes relevant here. Thomas tells of the basic principles and techniques
of psychoanalysis using the discourse of psychoanalysis in a dramatic way, that is, by
dramatizing psychoanalysis and parodying Freud. The relationship between the Id, the
ego, and the super-ego, together with the external factors influencing this relationship are
narrated through Freuds notes on a case study. Frau Anna, who is in fact Lisa Erdman, is
the object of study. Freud interprets Lisas writings and speeches, and the reader reads
this interpretation as part of the novel. From what Freud writes about Lisa the reader gets
the message that Freud is a human, as you see he is in error about Lisa, his interpretations
are misinterpretations and are limited by his desires, anxieties, and obsessions; he cannot
be objective, he can never know the truth of Lisas words, which Thomas will tell us later
in his novel.
At the beginning of his career Freud did think that the cause of mental illnesses is
the return of the repressed contents of a personal unconscious, which were mostly of a
sexual nature. Jung, on the other hand, linked the cause of mental illnesses to what he
called a collective unconscious which was the accumulation of the experience of
humanity throughout history as a whole. For Freud the cause of illness had something to
do with a past personal event, whereas for Jung mental illness had something to do with
the present and its relation to the future. Jung concentrated on the present moment in
which the past and the future dissolved into one another, but Freud insisted on looking for
the cause of illness in the personal history of the patient. Throughout the novel Freud
links Lisas mental and physical problems to some traumatizing sexual experiences she
had when she was a young girl. According to Freud every metaphorical image Lisa uses
in her surreal poems is a translation of Lisas unconscious desires, they are the returned
forms of a repressed memory, symptoms of a traumatic event. For instance Freud
197

interprets the imagery of white hotel in Lisas dreams as a manifestation of her will to
unite with the maternal body, and perhaps a will to go back into the secure environment
of the womb in which nothing is required of the organism. Nietzsche would have said
that Lisas will is a will to nothingness, rather than willing nothing. Lisa does get better
after Freuds therapy, she returns to music, she even gets married. But Lisa soon realizes
that this is only a temporary period of happiness. Lisa thinks that her mental problems
have something to do with the future, rather than the past. The reference to Jung is
obvious. In a letter she writes to Freud she confesses that she told lies to Freud about her
past. As for the reason behind her lies Lisa says,
Is there any family without a skeleton in the cupboard?
Frankly I didnt always wish to talk about the past; I was
more interested in what was happening to me then, and
what might happen in the future. In a way you made me
become fascinated by my mothers sin, and I am forever
grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to delve into
it. But I dont believe for one moment that had anything to
do with my being crippled with pain. It made me unhappy,
but not ill.129
The difference between Jung and Freud is a difference in method. Freud asks why
this dream, why has the patient had this particular dream rather than any other? But Jung
says that his own aim is the purpose of the dream, what the dream introduces to the
patients world. Although Thomas doesnt bring Jung and Lisa together at this stage of
the novel, he implies that Jungs attitude is more convenient for Lisas therapy. That
Lisas symptoms, rather than being the manifestations of a sexually oriented neurosis as
129

Thomas, 171
198

Freud assumed, are related to the Holocaust to come, that his symptoms are themselves
the emotional response she gives to the aggressive impulses haunting Europe is very
similar to what Jung experienced in 1910s. In the 1910s, Jung, just like Lisa, was having
hallucinations and was relating these to his personal life. But later it became clear to Jung
that these hallucinations were a result of the approaching violence on a massive scale. In
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes that following the death of some of his
friends he suffered from mental and physical problems similar to those of Lisa.
The couples Eros/Thanatos, Heaven/Hell, love/hate, Venus/Medusa in Lisas
poem are references to Jungs theories. For Jung the archetypes in the collective
unconscious of humanity is made of a series of oppositions. Among these good and evil
are the most important ones and are the two inseparable absolutes. In the novel Lisa says,
What torments me is whether life is good or evil. I think often of
that scene I stumbled into on my fathers yacht. The woman I
thought was praying had a fierce, frightening expression; but her
reflection was peaceful and smiling. The smiling woman (I think
it must have been my aunt) was resting her hand on my mothers
breast (as if to reassure her it was all right, she didnt mind). But
the faces at least to me now were so contradictory. And must
have been contradictory in themselves too: the grimacing woman,
joyful; and the smiling woman, sad. Medusa and Ceres, as you so
brilliantly say! It may sound crazy, but I think the idea of the incest
troubles me far more profoundly as a symbol than as a real event.
Good and evil coupling, to make the world. No, forgive me, I am
writing wildly. The ravings of a lonely spinster!130
130

Thomas, 171
199

Jungs answer to Lisas question is in his Psychology and Alchemy. According to

Jung,
[] in the self good and evil are indeed closer than identical twins!
[] Hence the truth about the self the unfathomable union of
good and evil comes out concretely in the paradox that although
sin is the gravest and most pernicious thing there is, it is still not so
serious that it cannot be disposed of with probabilist arguments.131
From Ferenczis letter to Freud at the beginning of the novel we learn that Jung
offends Freud by interpreting the imagery of peat-bog corpses as the bodies of
prehistoric men mummified by the effect of the humic acid in the bog water. 132 Jung
connects these peat-bog corpses to the primitive pre-historic monster running free in
the unconscious. Freud almost faints upon hearing Jungs interpretation and furiously
accuses Jung of being full of envious feelings toward him.
At the end of the novel, however, the peat-bog corpses turn out to be something
completely other than what Freud and Jung thought they were. Thomas questions not
only Freuds but also Jungs theories of the unconscious. The peat-bog corpses are
neither symptoms of neurosis, as Freud says, nor are they signifiers of the primitive side
of man as Jung says. The peat-bog corpses refer to the traumatic kernel of what
happened during the holocaust, the thousands of holocaust victims massacred at Babi Yar.
Neither Freuds nor Jungs theories can interpret and cure Lisas illness, because they
both impose a symbolic meaning upon the Real of Lisas experiences.
Just like psychoanalysis, literature too tries to symbolize the Real and translate the
unconscious drives into conscious and desirable forms. The forms, however, are false
131

Carl G. Jung, Problems of Alchemy, Selected Writings, ed. Anthony Storr (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 270-1
132
Thomas, 10
200

representations of the unconscious, and usually give false forms to percepts and affects;
literature is a falsification of the Real. In accordance with this, Thomas often refers to
other literary and non-literary texts, makes connections between them to expose their
self-contradictions, his meaning itself dissolves in this web of relations; meaning
proliferates. Finding himself/herself in this hubris of intertextuality, in this abundance of
meaning, the reader thinks that he/she has understood the novel, when in fact he/she is
drowning in the meaninglessness overflowing the text. All these illusions collapse with
the chapter about Babi Yar. It becomes clear to the reader that it was all an illusion, and
behind this illusion there is nothing but a big, black, hungry spider waiting for him/her.
Where there should have been a void, death, there is this black spider to stand in for it.
This black spider is the Lacanian objet petit a par excellence. In The White Hotel the
objet petit a is a life consuming monster projected onto the Real.
Lisa sighed. Why is it like this, Richard? We were made to be
happy and to enjoy life. Whats happened? He shook his head in
bafflement, and breathed out smoke. Were we made to be happy?
Youre an incurable optimist, old girl!133

2. Is Everyman an Island?
Islands are either from before or after humankind.134
Gilles Deleuze

William Goldings Lord of The Flies is an allegory of the death-drive inherent in

human nature. It is a reversal of Ballantynes The Coral Island. In direct opposition to
133

Thomas, 239-40
Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New
York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 9
201
134

The Coral Island in which three young men establish the British culture on an island after
their ship sinks in the Pacific Ocean, in Lord of The Flies we have children who become
deranged and lose control of their aggressive impulses on a deserted island. In the
absence of an external authority they become more and more violent. Golding is implying
that humankind is violent by nature and the absence of symbolic order initiates a
regressive process governed by the unconscious drives leading to violence and
destruction.
People prefer security and certainty to truth, they want an unshakable, stable order
in which they can feel secure. They want object relations that sustain the conditions of
impossibility for dispersal and death. Their will is a will not to truth but to security of the
womb. And yet this striving for security itself brings calamities on the subject. For being
in pursuit of the past is a product of will to nothingness and will to nothingness is nothing
but the desire for death disguised as desire for the mothers womb. Science attempts to
construct the relationship between the subject and its objects in such a way as to serve the
ideology, which subjects the individual to certain rules and regulations in the way of
manufacturing an illusory sense of security. This is the definition of ideology in a
nutshell. For Socrates, as Nietzsche points out in The Birth of Tragedy, one has to be
judged before the courts of Logos, become nameable, become an object of knowledge, to
be able to become nice and good.
How can the good principle win over the bad principle? To answer this question I
turn back to Lord of The Flies and Deleuzes definition of an island as it appears in
Desert Islands. An island is the proper place for horror fiction. An island is detached from
the external world; it is surrounded by water and is closed in on itself. On an island the
subject is alone and this aloneness in the absence of a symbolic order brings the subject
202

closer to its primordial form which is the state of being governed by the death-drive. On
an island everything starts anew and progresses in time. A generic singularity is like an
island to be sown with the seeds of new forms of life. The concept of island has for a long
time been an object standing in for either the dark side or the brighter side of civilization.
In Thomas Mores Utopia for instance, we see a better world contrasted with the dark
world of the dominant symbolic order in Mores day. Likewise, in Aldous Huxleys
Island we see all the social problems of humanity solved on an Island called Pala. In Pala,
family structure, habits of consumption-production, relation to body, healthy living, etc.
all take a new form. In Brave New World Huxley had portrayed an exact opposite
situation in which a knowledge based on the principles of totalitarianism was the regime
governing life, love, and truth.
The island in Lord of The Flies becomes the stage on which the children regress to
a primitive state and all their aggressive impulses come to the fore as a result of the
absence of certain governing principles imposed on them. Goldings attitude can easily be
considered conservative, or even as advocating the goodness of totalitarianism.
Goldings pessimism is divided within itself. It is his intellect that is pessimistic,
as for his will its highly optimistic. With the pessimism of his intellect he controls his
will and keeps optimism at bay. When the intellect is pessimistic it strives to make things
better and if the will is ill then this striving to make things better turns into a will to
nothingness. Although the intellect seems to be the uniting force, the life-drive,
represented by Eros, the reverse is the case, for it is will that is the uniting force and the
intellect is the splitting force. Intellect splits objects surrounding the subject in the way of
attaining an indivisible remainder. Atomization of thought stops when one reaches that
indivisible remainder, which is the unsymbolizable traumatic kernel, the real of ones
203

desire, which is the death-drive. It is only through entry into the symbolic order that the
death-drive turns into the life-drive. In this context, we can say that the life-drive belongs
to the depressive position and the death-drive belongs to the paranoid-schizoid position.
On a deserted island the subject regresses to the paranoid-schizoid position and in its
detachment becomes aggressive towards the objects surrounding it. Since there is no
object at which the subject can direct its aggressiveness the subject turns against itself.
On an island there is no object to which the subject can project his bad objects. The bad
objects explode like shit and poison the subject which increases the rapidity of
deterioration and regress to a state before birth, which is the same state as that of after
death. It is on an island that the conflict between the life drive and the death drive
emerges on the surface in the form of conflict-events. These conflict-events give birth to
symptoms. In the process of turning these symptoms into objects of knowledge the
psychoanalyst, philosopher, artist, or scientist, all translate them into acceptable forms,
that is, they give forms to affects, percepts, and concepts in the way of making the subject
get rid of this fundamental antagonism. All life is conflict and on a deserted island this
conflict and the suffering it causes are magnified by inordinate measures. An island is a
microscopic setting for the exposition of the other within, the evil, the tyrant, the fascist
in everyone of us, to which, according to Nietzsche, not only the intellect but also the will
submit.
Perhaps Nietzsches most important contribution to philosophy is not only the
distinction he makes between knowledge and truth, but also the asymmetrical relationship
he establishes between will and intellect, a reversal of Schopenhauers symmetrical
model in which the will is portrayed as the exact opposite of intellect. When Nietzsche
says man would much rather will nothingness than not will, what he wants to say is
204

that man would prefer to want to contain nothingness, that is, introject the emptiness
opened by the death of God, rather than prefer not to have anything, which would mean
projecting everything in him onto the object cause of desire, hence disqualifying it as
bad-object. This also means that the subject ceases to be a subject, but becomes an object
of the life-drive. Life-drive, with its unificatory and binding force, constitutes not the
subject but the absence of the subject. By imposing a unity on the infinity of the subject
as death-drive, Eros subjectivizes the subject in process and turns it into a static entity, an
object of desire. It is from then onwards that the subject is shaped as an object of desire
under the rule of the symbolic order. To escape from the condition of being caught up in
this system which the subject reproduces even when he thinks he is negating it consists in
surviving the conflict between the life-drive and the death-drive, in other words, passing
across the gap separating knowledge and truth, and filling a space in time as a
symbolically self-identical subject, while the Real subject is oppressed and strives to
signify the gap inherent in the symbolic order. It is only through splitting the given unities
and continuities that the Real subject can manifest itself. This Real can only manifest
itself in the form of absences, gaps, splits, which are themselves the openings to the Real
of the subject as the death-drive.
It is the vicious cycle of the life and death drives that is being produced and
exploited by global capitalism today. Through a manipulation of the healthy conflict, the
relationship between the life and death drives is turned into antagonism. Undecidability,
absence of foundational truth procedures, loss of principles, and declarations of the end
of history are all manifestations of a discursive disease which is very rapidly
contaminating the relationship between humans and their own health. In a world where a
normal person must have a therapist, where having a therapist is a sign of normalcy, there
205

can be no other choice but to shake the foundations of the illusions on which the health of
many generations to come depends.
3. The Projection-Introjection Mechanism in Jack Kerouacs The Subterraneans
The consequences of projection of fantasies onto the Real can be clearly observed
in Kerouacs The Subterraneans, which was quite a subversive book in its time, carrying
Kerouac quite high up the cultural ladder, and in Burroughsian terms causing thousands
of Levis sold.
In The Subterraneans we see Jack Kerouacs persona Leo oscillating between
attraction to and repulsion by Mardou who is a Cherokee American. One half of Leo
loves Mardou and the other half is afraid of this love. If in one chapter Leo declares his
love for Mardou, in the next chapter we see him resenting her. Leos oscillation between
the life drive and the death drive constitute a movement between negation and the
transcendence of this negation. Affirmation always remains at bay for Kerouac and his
character Leo. Perhaps only at the beginning of the novel he gets a bit closer to
affirmation, but this affirmation is in no way an affirmation of Mardou as she is. Rather, it
is the affirmation of what has happened throughout the novel, an affirmation of that
which has lead to the break-up of Mardou and Leo, as if what has taken place was what
actually happened, rather than a projection of Leos paranoid fantasy on what has actually
happened. At the end of the novel it becomes clear that all that has been lived had been
lived for this novel to be written, rather than for its own sake.
[] this was my three week thought and really the energy behind
or the surface one behind the creation of the Jealousy Phantasy in
the Grey Guilt dream of the World Around Our Bed.)now I saw
Mardou pushing Yuri with a OH YOU and I shuddered to think
206

something maybe was going on behind my back felt warned too

by the quick and immediate manner Yuri heard me coming and
rolled off but as if guiltily as I say after some kind of goose or feel
up some illegal touch of Mardou which made her purse little love
loff lips at him and push at him and like kids.135
Upon having the dream Leo begins to see everything through the keyhole of his
obsession that one day Mardou will sleep with Yuri if she hasnt already done so. I would
like to read this story with the story of Adam and Eves fall from Heaven to Earth in
mind, or the passage from the old Earth to the new Earth. Whats at stake here is the
conflict between whats going on in Leos mind as to whats going on in Mardous mind
and whats really going on in Mardous mind. There is, in reality, nothing going on in
Mardous mind. It is Leo projecting what he read in the Bible onto Mardous mind, what
he read in the Bible being that it was Eve who caused the fall, for it was her who tempted
Adam to eat the apple. So Leo is projecting what he has introjected from the Bible. And
the Bible was the representation of women in general and his mother in particular for
Kerouac. The preconception in Leos mind that women are evil, sinful, and guilty by
nature both attracts and repels Leo. This state of being caught in a movement between
repulsion/attraction ties the subject with an endless chain of negative associations to his
own fear of being betrayed, pushing him further towards madness and death. The final
words of the book bring the end which Leo was from the beginning of the relationship
more than willing to reach: separation and through writing it down reunification with the
lost object. For as we know from Freud, writing was in its origin the voice of an absent
person.
And I go home having lost her love.
135

Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans (Penguin: London, 2001), 69

207

And write this book.136

Leo believes that he has had the dream and that if he has the dream of it the
sexual intercourse in real life has either taken place or will take place in the future.
Kerouac/Leo is, at present, writing The Subterraneans. And everything has already
taken place; the sequence of events follows this way: Leo has the dream, Mardou engages
in sexual intercourse with Yuri, Mardou and Leo break up, Leo continues the daydream,
laughs to retain sanity in the face of this tragedy, and goes home and writes this book. In
it there is no true story; and it doesnt matter whether there is or not a true story other
than the story of an unhappy consciousness running towards its death in and through a
story of love, affection, resentment, guilt, and compassion, which exposes the symptoms
of a life as it unceasingly wills its subjects end.
[]still making no impression on my eager impressionable readyto-create construct destroy and die brain as will be seen in the
great construction of jealousy which I later from a dream and for
reasons of self-laceration recreated137
Now, Leo sees Mardou in bed with Yuri and obsessively believes that his dream
will come true. Leo believes himself to be a clairvoyant, that he has the ability to know
things prior to seeing them actually taking place before his eyes. This he has introjected
from Mardou herself, who, in a Nietzschean fashion, believes, does, and says things
which simultaneously repel and attract Leo. There is no linear narrative in Mardous story
about her adventures with the subterraneans of San Francisco and Leo likes it because
there remain lots of gaps for him to fill with his fantasies later on when he is writing his
story. Say what she may,
136
137

Kerouac, The Subterraneans, 93

Kerouac, 39
208

I got nervous and had some kind of idea about Mike, he kept
looking at me like he wanted to kill me he has such a funny look
anyway I got out of the house and walked along and didnt know
which way to go, my mind kept turning into the several directions
that I was thinking of going but my body kept walking straight
along Columbus altho I felt the sensation of each of the directions
I mentally and emotionally turned into, amazed at all the possible
directions you can take with different motives that come in, like it
can make you a different person Ive often thought of this since
childhood, of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually
did Id turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is
insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my
whole life in the end? Whats in store for me in the direction I
dont take? and all that, so if this had not been such a constant
preoccupation that accompanied me in my solitude which I played
upon in as many different ways as possible I wouldnt bother now
except but seeing the horrible roads this pure supposing goes to it
took me to frights, if I wasnt so damned persistent and so on
deep into the day, a long confusing story only pieces of which and
imperfectly I remember, just the mass of the misery in connective
form 138
What, then, is this connective form? Who, then, is the subject of this mass of
misery pieces of which are imperfectly remembered? There is a different way of
remembering in action here, a different way of being in relation to time and language in
138

Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans, 20

209

this imperfect remembrance of the lived experiences. The problem with Kerouacs
writing is that he is not separating his introjected object from the projecting subject.
Kerouac wants to represent Mardou as she is and yet he at the same time wants to prove
that Leo was the one pulling the strings from the beginning. What Mardou is actually
trying to convey is veiled by Kerouac who makes it impossible for the reader to
distinguish between fiction and reality, self and other, subject and object, projected and
introjected. His voice dissolves into the voice of Mardou and Mardous story remains
unheard. Rather than unveiling, Kerouacs writing not only veils but also manipulates the
truth of the other for his abusive purposes. All his life Kerouac struggled to traverse this
field of partial representations of the other, but being an innocent fascist he repeatedly fell
into his own traps and failed in affirming the real as it is. If he could have loved the real
as it is, he could have delivered himself from his automatic reactions, and thus he could
have become a body without organs.139
While most of us live by the time of good sense, the Nietzschean
subject is able to defy such sense and experience the creative
evolution of self in exploration of a deeper memory the virtual
memory of the pure past as the event of events of the eternal
return. Rather than a self-identical self, the self of the third
synthesis of time is a creatively evolving self who is able to
genuinely affirm life as metamorphosis.140
139

Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (University of California: Berkeley, 1975), 570-1
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom
then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dancehalls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.
140

Tamsin Lorraine, Living a Time Out of Joint, Between Deleuze and Derrida, eds.
Paul Patton and John Protevi (Continuum: London and NY, 2003), 39
210

Leo chooses to become partially mad, for Mardou is the other half of his madness.
The internal theatre of Leo stages a sexual intercourse between Mardou and Yuri and/but
although this intercourse has not yet taken place, Leo is assured that one day it will. Leo
had started plotting ways of getting rid of Mardou three weeks prior to their split. Is this
will a will to end the relationship that makes Leo see this dream? In other words, is the
source of this dream a will-to-nothingness-oriented-hope, a wish that Mardou will engage
in sexual intercourse with Yuri and the relationship will end that way? Or is the dream
based on a will-to-nothingness-oriented-fear that Mardou does not, and has never loved
Leo? These questions can be asked if one wants to know what the dream means, in other
words these questions are interpretation oriented questions and my aim here is not to
interpret Leos dream and understand what it means but rather to make use of this dream
in understanding why this dream matters not only for The Subterraneans, but also for
twentieth century philosophy, literature, cultural and critical theory, and psychoanalysis.
Both Oedipus and Leo see themselves as innocent victims caught in a trap set by
the God. Fiction and reality give birth to one another in each case. In Oedipus case the
prophecy turns into truth, in Leos case a dream turns into reality. Leo believes in what he
sees in his dream and he sees Mardou in bed with Yuri. And his strong belief, almost an
obsession, that one day Mardou will sleep with Yuri gives birth to the actualisation of this
event at the end of the novel. Leo tells everyone about his dream. He tells Mardou almost
every day following his dream that he is worried about the future of their relationship.
Leos paranoid-schizoid attitude prepares the grounds for the actualization of what he was
afraid of. At the end of the story, the only thing left at hand for Leo to make the best of is
to write his experiences down and turn his loss into a gain in and through language. Leo
is such a tragic character that in order to remain sane he has to laugh at himself by
211

considering the whole host and foolish illusion and entire rigmarole and madness we
erect in the place of one love, in our sadness...141 to be a joke. When Leo learns that
Mardou has actually slept with Yuri, when the truth is finally established, when fiction
turns into reality, he addresses the reader:
[...]but I continue the daydream and I look into his eyes and I see
suddenly the glare of a jester angel who made his presence on earth all a
joke and I realize that this too with Mardou was a joke and I think, Funny
Angel, elevated amongst the subterraneans.
Baby its up to you, is what shes actually saying, about how
many times you wanta see me and all that but I want to be independent
like I say.
And I go home having lost her love.
And write this book.142
Kerouac writes through love, but through a love that Leo is afraid of falling in.
And his writing is the product of a sick desire, it is driven by a love of love, a desire to be
desired. Kerouac exposes himself through Leo in such a way as to show why it is
necessary to create something without becoming destructive of either the self or the other.
Something that he himself doesnt know how to do. It is an ill will that drives Kerouac
towards manic-depressive, self-destructive alcoholism. His consciousness of the absence
of eternal love in this finite life together with his immortal longing for an eternal love
turn him into a shipwreck on the shores of lust. What Kerouac lacks in life is what is
necessary to operate the war-machine in Kerouac. Love is the force that drives the warmachine and Kerouac is afraid of loving with a greater love, without projective
141
142

Kerouac, The Subterraneans (Penguin: London, 2001), 77

Kerouac, 93
212

identification. He is a paranoid love-machine because his love is in the form of a spark

given birth by the struggle between the superiority and the inferiority complexes he
simultaneously harbors within himself.
In the absence of a warmachine, war dominates the world. And when war
dominates the world there is nothing left for one to write but that although his books are
among the most important examples of a different way of being in relation to time,
language, and life, Kerouac is locked into an attenuating endgame, playing himself, with
each move, further into a corner and into defeat. 143 He, suffering inordinately from an
irrecoverable loss, an irreparable deterioration of psychic and somatic health, pays a high
price to render us the witnesses of his fantastic experiences.
Kerouac died in 1969 and/but long ago, in 1951, eighteen years before ceasing to
exist among the living, in On the Road, he writes this:
And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I
always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across
chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the
bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at
my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and
myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew
into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and
inconceivable radiances

shining in bright Mind Essence,

innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of

heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething soar which wasnt in
my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I
realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just
143

J.M. Coetzee, Youth (Secker and Warburg: London, 2002), 169

213

didnt remember especially because the transition from life to

death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for
naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the
utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only
because of the stability of the intrinsic mind that these ripples of
birth and death took place, like that action of wind on a sheet of
pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a
big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in
the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought
I was going to die the very next moment.144
What Kerouac enjoys is death from pleasure, what he desires is suffering. In
Kerouacs writing there is a multiplication of the directions towards which it becomes
possible for the subject to head as the subject goes along the way creating new life forces
out of his Dionysiac regress. In time, however, Kerouacs revolutionary becoming takes
such a direction that his desire turns against itself turning him into a reactive force
drowning in his own resentment. The Kerouac image represented by the media
(newspapers, TV, radio), is in conflict with Kerouacs image of himself, and this relation
to himself of Kerouac through a media, through an external force, through a panoptic eye,
locks Kerouac into the projection-introjection mechanism through which he constantly
breaks and is beaten by as he beats. This operation is more than Kerouac can actively
handle, and turns him into a reactive and anti-social person making him rather will
nothingness than not will, destroying him in the process.

Conclusion of Part III

144

Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, 1957), 173
214

In Julio Cortazars short story Axolot, we read the main character realizing that
the type of fish called Axolot stand still in water with no movement at all, a kind of
motionless flight. With this realization the character commits himself to becoming like
those fish himself. At the end of the story he sees everyone outside of himself as an
Axolot fish. He has become an axolot himself. He has gone beyond the finitude of his
existence. He becomes altogether immobile, merely an observer, watching people, life,
opportunities, and time pass by. Eventually he becomes imperceptible. Here and now
everything is continually changing towards becoming-imperceptible. Time turns
something into nothing. Everything is in time only for a short period of time. Then
everything disappears in a neutral light.
To have dismantled ones self in order finally to be alone
and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A
clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become
like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only
for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be
anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.145
It is the ambiguity of the relationship between the life drive and the death drive
that is being manipulated by global capitalism (contemporary nihilism) today.
Undecidability, absence of foundational truth procedures, loss of principles, and
declarations of the end of history and the subject are all manifestations of a discursive
disease which is very rapidly contaminating the relationship between humans and their
own health. In a world where a normal person must have a therapist, where having a

145

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 1988), 197
215

therapist is a sign of normalcy, there can be no other choice but to shake the foundations
of the illusions on which the health of many generations to come depends.
Carrying out an intervention in the course of events, introducing a split into the
continuity of things requires learning how not to be produced by the image factory which
captures desire in a certain order of signification mechanism so as to turn the subject into
a copy of the products of the image factory, or into the object of the others interpretation
and identification processes. To become capable at least to subvert the codes of the
capitalist axiomatics which produces desire as the desire of nothingness and death, this
subject should come to a realization that he/she is already caught up in the projectionintrojection mechanism. So the subject has to learn to use the projection-introjection
mechanism in such a way as to sustain the conditions for the impossibility of wickedness
in the form of exclusive and illusory constructions of the Real. Surviving the absence of a
transcendental signified in a time out of joint requires learning to love the object of
desire for what it is rather than for what it resembles. This is to love and live without
projective identification, without paranoid reactions to the other, without possessing the
other, or without confining the other within the boundaries of the self. One has to cease to
be somebody and learn to become nobody so as to create a difference in and for itself and
affirm this difference by affirming the difference of that which is not I.
CONSEQUENCES: Beyond The Life Death Drives
1. The Immortal Subject Beyond The Life Drive
In our daily lives we create little worlds of our own and invest them with various
meanings. These worlds have their own logics, orders repetitively staged every day; this
gives us a sense of continuity in time and hence a sense of security. Objects and subjects

216

surrounding us, everything fits in its proper place in this microcosmic self-consciousness
of ours.
The thought of being a tiny spot in the middle of nowhere, however, or
somewhere in the vast universe is too unbearable to be thought through for many people
because it reminds us of death. If one thinks this thought for too long all meaning
collapses and life falls apart, the established symbolic order of object relations become
disorganized. This is when the journey of the subject towards nothingness begins. If the
subject manages to maintain integrity throughout the passage from self-consciousness to
an impersonal consciousness reconciliation of self with life and the world takes place.
With the advance of this macrocosmic impersonal consciousness in time everything
symbolic loses meaning and credibility only to lead to an opening up of a space for the
emergence of a new meaning. The new is not independent from the old. But is that which
had hitherto been unseen, unrealised, unthought as a new possibility of a progressive
movement.
Authentic fidelity is the fidelity to the void itselfto the very act
of loss, of abandoning or erasing the object. Why should the dead
be the object of attachment in the first place? The name for this
fidelity is death drive. In the terms of dealing with the dead, one
should, perhaps, against the work of mourning as well as against
the melancholic attachment to the dead who return as ghosts, assert
the Christian motto let the dead bury their dead. The obvious
reproach to this motto is, What are we to do when, precisely, the
dead do not accept to stay dead, but continue to live in us, haunting
us by their spectral presence? One is tempted here to claim that the
217

most radical dimension of the Freudian death drive provides the

key to how we are to read the Christian let the dead bury their
dead: what death drive tries to obliterate is not the biological life
but the very afterlifeit endeavours to kill the lost object the
second time, not in the sense of mourning (accepting the loss
through symbolization) but in a more radical sense of obliterating
the very symbolic texture, the letter in which the spirit of the dead
survives.146
So, neither the work of mourning nor melancholia are progressive. It is the work
of death drive to kill death, to cause a loss of loss, to destroy the symbolic texture causing
death to take place; death drive is the only weapon against death in life. Rather than
symbolizing and then accepting death, the subject as death drive contemplates death as
nothingness and fills the space of death within the symbolic with nothing.
Zizek points out that there is a great difference between willing nothing and
willing nothingness.
What we are implicitly referring to here is, of course, Nietzsches
classic opposition between wanting nothing (in the sense of I
dont want anything) and the nihilistic stance of actively wanting
Nothingness itself; following Nietzsches path, Lacan emphasized
how in anorexia, the subject does not simply eat nothing rather,
she or he actively wants to eat the Nothingness (the Void) that is
itself the ultimate object-cause of desire. (The same goes for Ernst
Kriss famous patient who felt guilty of theft, although he did not
actually steal anything: what he did steal, again, was the
146

Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies (London: Routledge, 2004), 13

218

Nothingness itself.) So along the same lines, in the case of

caffeine-free diet Coke, we drink the Nothingness itself, the pure
semblance of a property that is in effect merely an envelope of a
void.147
The object that takes the place of the Real is what Lacan calls the objet petit a.
The objet petit a is that which the master-signifier causes to be signified. There is nothing
to signify the objet petit a, it is that signifier itself. The master-signifier signifies the objet
petit a as its own signifier. Without the objet petit a the nothingness behind the mastersignifier would become manifest. Master signifier generates signs that signify their own
autonomous existence. That is, they hide the latent content of the master-signifier which
is nothingness. By manufacturing the illusion of its own non-being the master-signifier
signifies itself as the transcendental signified. It does this through signifying the objet
petit a as the transcendental sign, (signifier and signified at once). The sublime object
which stands in for nothingness behind it is the object of desire of masses who fantasize
that they are drinking something good, when in reality they are drinking the void and
their own life/death.
One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the willing that
has received its direction from the ascetic ideal actually expresses:
this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the
material, this abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of
happiness and of beauty, this longing away from all appearance,
change, becoming, death, wish, longing itselfall of this means
let us grasp thisa will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a
rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but
147

Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), 23

219

it is and remains a will! And, to say again at the end what I said
at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness than not
will 148
In The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Zizek gives the example of Diet-Coke as a
symptom of will to nothingness inherent in contemporary society.
So, when, some years ago, the advertising slogan for Coke was
Coke is it!, we should note its thorough ambiguity: thats it
precisely in so far as thats never actually it, precisely in so far as
every satisfaction opens up a gap of I want more!. The paradox,
therefore, is that Coke is not an ordinary commodity whereby itsuse value is transubstantiated into an expression of (or
supplemented with) the auratic dimension of pure (exchange)
Value, but a commodity whose very peculiar use-value is itself
already a direct embodiment of the suprasensible aura of the
ineffable spiritual surplus, a commodity whose very material
properties are already those of a commodity. This process is
brought to its conclusion in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke
why? We drink Coke or any drink for two reasons: for its
thirst-quenching or nutritional value, and for its taste. In the case of
caffeine-free diet Coke, nutritional value is suspended and the
caffeine, as the key ingredient of its taste, is also taken away all
that remains is a pure semblance, an artificial promise of a
substance which never materialized. Is it not true that in this sense,
148

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, transl. Maudemarie Clark and

Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 118
220

in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, we almost literally drink

nothing in the guise of something?149
By drinking Diet-Coke, the subject, rather than being really healthy, is being
merely less ill, since Diet or not, Coke is itself unhealthy. Coke as we know it is miles
away from its medicinal uses for which it was invented in the first place. The measure of
health is not Coke without caffeine and sugar. So the Diet-Coke cannot be a sign of
healthy living. Worse than being unhealthy, it is death disguised as an object of desire,
that object of desire being healthy living. So we can see the process through which the
Real of the subjects desire, which is the death-drive, is turned into desire for healthy
living. As the subject thinks he/she is moving towards greater health, he/she is in reality
moving towards death. We have to be clear about where exactly the life-drive and the
death-drive become separated from themselves and hence their roles are reversed, turning
them into their opposites. It is precisely at this point of separation- unification of the lifedrive and the death-drive that the conflict-event takes the place of the place itself.
This place is a playground on which this conflict-event between the life-drive and
the death-drive is played out as a confrontation between the therapeutic society and
critical theory. If the aim of psychotherapy is to adapt the subject to the environment,
then it is by definition a normalizing practice. But asks critical theory, what is the
definition of health? On which grounds are we talking about health? What are the values
that make health? All these questions may lead down to the big question of ontology:
What is the meaning of life? There is no meaning of life. It is my actions and words
that invest my life with a particular meaning. What determines the meaning of objects
surrounding me is the use I put them into. In this context, progress in therapeutic

149

Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 22

221

procedure is signified by an increase in the subjects ability to use the objects surrounding
him/her.
But critical theory says: you are confusing use-value and exchange-value. You are
forgetting the need to remember that in your world the exchange-value preceeds the usevalue. You are always already born into the world of objects with their values attached to
them, how can you say that you are healing these people by telling lies to them
concerning the cause of their desire and the Real of the objects they choose to put to use.
Isnt their choice already determined by the pre-dominant symbolic order?150
Critical theory agrees with psychotherapy that it is the use value of the object that
is important. But what critical theory wants to say is that what psychotherapy presents the
subject with, as the use-value, is already the exchange-value, so psychotherapy is
presenting the subject with death disguised as life. It is there that there has been a shift in
the gears, where Nietzsche conceived of himself as the stage of confrontation between
Christ and Dionysus, as the conflict-event that shifted the gears at a certain moment in
history. At this precise moment in time negation and affirmation change roles for the very
reason that negating the symbolic order becomes the same as affirming the Real. One
creates a fantasy which negates the symbolic and affirms the Real as it is, that is, with all
its inconsistencies, internal conflicts, imperfections, and incompleteness. Something in
the symbolic order is caused to fail by these interventions of the affirmative subject. Here
a question awaits us: Does that mean that for creation to take place destruction is
necessary? The answer to this question is a yes and a no at the same time. Because
destruction causes a split in the order and yet this splits consequence depends on the
future of the response to it. Destruction is not essential to creation but is an inescapable
150

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964)

222

result of it. 151 So there may or may not be cases where there is something in the process
of being created without anything being destroyed. For when one thinks about it, creation
is not a subtraction from nature, but quite the contrary, an addition to it. For subtraction to
become creative it should be a subtraction from culture, that is, from knowledge, or from
the already existing symbolic order. Badious subtraction opens a void within the already
existing symbolic order and through this void a new truth flows. It is only in so far as the
mortal human animal chooses fidelity to this truth-event that it becomes a subject, that is,
an immortal indifferent to death.
2. The Immortal Subject Beyond The Death Drive
The creature called human can cease being a passive non-being and become an
active being only insofar as it produces love against the negative power of the already
existing capitalist law. As we all know, the laws negative impositions give birth to the
vicious cycle of the life and death drives, which is in turn exploited in the way of more
money.
With the domination of nihilist global capitalism all over the world social life has
become a masquerade. The silence diminishes and noise pollutes the lives of all. This
noise is what Nietzsche calls the noise of the marketplace. The subject neither
questions its being in itself nor its being for itself. The system provides the subject with
innumerable facilities to keep boredom at bay so as to sustain the conditions for the
possibility of the non-being of thought to take place. The subject simply does not feel the
need to think and in time the subject loses the ability not only to think but also to act
consciously. It all becomes an empty and meaningless spectacle to live. Every subject
takes on a role, or an identity in accordance with the demands of the show business and
151

Alain Badiou, InfiniteThought, trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum,

2005), 132

223

hides behind this role turning into a solipsistic monad acting itself out in the way of
satisfying the big Other. Just like Judge Schreber who had to endure inordinate measures
of suffering to satisfy the demands of those cruel gods he populated himself with And
Schreber, satisfied as he was with the mere pleasure of sharing the high profile mission of
satisfying cruel and invisible gods, becomes a madman when in fact he was a woman
enduring privation.152
In the banality of ordinary social reality the subject forgets to think of its death as
its own. Absence of the thought of death brings with it the presence of the thought of
being, which means that the subject has lost his/her sense of self/other distinction, and is
governed by his/her unconscious drives. This leads to the subjects ignorance of an
external world, or perhaps an unintentional neglect of an external reality other than the
one it imagines, for it has itself become exterior to itself.
When death is thought about, this thought never takes place in terms of the death
of the self. It is always through the death of the other that the subject thinks of death. It is
always a they who die. Death is conceived as a symbolic incident. The reason of that
reductive attitude towards death is the will to preserve the banality of ordinary reality and
sustain the conditions for the possibility of an illusory sense of oneness with the world.
All this, of course, is done to keep the Real of the external world at bay.
Global capitalism produces subjects who cannot stand the thought of the outside;
they cannot conceive the absence of an external world within them. The fear of death is
so strong that with the force of its negativity it totally negates death in life, erases the
slash in life/death, and vainly erects statues to attain immortality.
152

Sigmund Freud, Psycho-analytic Notes On An Autobiogrophical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

(Dementia Paranoids), trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth Press, 1986)

224

It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering

about over the body without organs, but always remaining
peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of
the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere
a reward in the form of a becoming an avatar, being born of the
states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state. Its
me, and so its mine Even suffering, as Marx says, is a form of
self-enjoyment.153
Today the purpose of life has become keeping the subject busy for the sake of the
business of not thinking death. The subject is bombarded by objects of introjection to
such extent that it has no time for feeling anxious about its own death. The objects form a
transparent sheet between the subject and its death. As inorganic substances the objects
fill the space of death within life. What we witness in this time is life turned into a project
aiming at erasing the silence necessary for thought; and not only erasing but also
replacing it with an unceasing noise causing nausea.
The infinite, then, is within finitude, so in order to think the infinite we have to
think the finite, that is, the thought of death. Although the thought of death has a high
price which the subject pays by a loss of mental and physical health, it is nevertheless
useful in opening up the way to limit experiences. The death drive devastates the
predominant conceptualisations of the good of civilized progress and the bad of
barbaric regress. The subject of the death drive situates itself as the traitor on the opposite
pole of belief and faith in immortality. In the place of statues representing immortality, it
erects nothing. That way it confronts the promised land of total security and harmony
153

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 16

225

with a world governed by the anxiety of the feeling of being surrounded by nothingness.
In this world there remains no ground beneath the symbolic order. Death is in the midst
of life; it is life that surrounds death.
How would our lives change if we were to become capable of imagining
ourselves as immortal beings? If we keep in mind that we are always already locked
within the vicious cycle of the life and death drives governed by the law of capital, it
becomes easier to understand why we need to break this vicious cycle of Capitalism and
its governor, liberal-democracy, based on unjust representations, in order to create,
produce or present the realm of love beyond the rotary motion of drives. But it must also
be kept in mind that when we say beyond, we are talking about a beyond which is always
already within the pre-dominant symbolic order and yet not within the reach of mortal
beings. It is a beyond only from the perspective of the present state. In our scenario,
immortality is not something to be attained, rather, it is a virtual potential or an actual
capacity within every mortal being, awaiting to be realised. The realisation of the
immortality within us, or the realisation of the infinite potential that life contains,
depends on our proper use of our powers of imagination. Let us imagine ourselves as
immortal beings then, which we already are, but cannot enact because of the finitude
imposed upon us by the already existing symbolic order. Would we need to get out of this
order to become immortal? Yes and no. Yes, because the within which we said infinity
resides is a within which is exterior only from the point of view of the already existing
order. No, because only from within the already existing order can we present an outside
of this order, an outside in Deleuzes words apropos of Foucault and Blanchot, which
is closer than any interiority and further away than any exteriority.

226

In his Theoretical Writings Alain Badiou attempts to separate himself from the
Romantic understanding of infinity, and the pursuit of immortality. According to Badiou,
contemporary mathematics broke with the Romantic idea of infinity by dissolving the
Romantic concept of finitude. For Badiou, as it is for mathematics, the infinite is nothing
but indifferent multiplicity, whereas for the Romantics it was nothing more than a
historical envelopment of finitude. Behind all this, of course, is Badious strong
opposition to historicism and temporalization of the concept. It is in this context that
Badiou can say, Romantic philosophy localizes the infinite in the temporalization of the
concept as a historical envelopment of finitude.154
Mathematics now treats the finite as a special case whose concept
is derived from that of the infinite. The infinite is no longer that
sacred exception co-ordinating an excess over the finite, or a
negation, a sublation of finitude. For contemporary mathematics, it
is the infinite that admits of a simple, positive definition, since it
represents the ordinary form of multiplicities, while it is the finite
that is deduced from the infinite by means of negation or limitation.
If one places philosophy under the condition such a mathematics, it
becomes impossible to maintain the discourse of the pathos of
finitude. We are infinite, like every multiple-situation, and the
finite is a lacunal abstraction. Death itself merely inscribes us
within the natural form of infinite being-multiple, that of the limit
ordinal, which punctuates the recapitulation of our infinity in a
pure, external dying.155
154

Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, (London:
Continuum, 2006), 38
155
Badiou, 38
227

The political implications of the move from Romantic infinity to mathematical

infinity can be observed in Badious Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. In
this little book Badiou criticizes the hypocrisy of human rights for reducing being-human
to being a mortal animal. Of course Badiou admits that what is called human is indeed a
mortal animal, but what he objects to is the exploitation of this state of being. Against this
deprecative attitude, Badiou pits the immortal subject, or rather, the subject who is
capable of realising his/her immortality.156
Badiou says that being is inconsistent multiplicity. As an advocate of
immanence, unlike Heidegger, he doesnt think that there is an ontological difference
between Being and beings. As a matter of fact, he altogether refuses that there is such a
thing as Being transcending the multiple beings, or beings as inconsistent multiplicities.
To understand where Badiou is coming from we only need to look at his critique of
Heideggers equation of being in the world and being towards death. For Badiou there is
no such thing as being in the world, because for him there is not one world but multiple
worlds and consequently being in the world as being towards death is a rather
impoverished idea doomed to result in the mistaken assumption that consciousness of
human finitude is self-consciousness. And I agree with Badiou that consciousness of
human finitude merely serves to justify a life driven by death.
I therefore propose a consciousness of infinitude rather than of finitude for a
sustenance of the conditions of possibility for an ethical life and for an ethical death. For
when you think about it, if we were immortal, that is, if our lives were eternal, we
wouldnt be so destructive of the environment, not so harsh on nature and one another,
because no one would want to live in such a hell eternally. Since it is obvious that as
156

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(London: Verso, 2001), 41
228

humans we have been turning the world into a hell in the name of progress for a while
now, and since death has been the end from which we have come to think we have been
striving to escape in this progressive process, it is obvious that a forgetting of death, or
rather, a remembering to forget our mortality would make us fear an eternal life in hell,
rather than a finite life in an illusory heaven.
If we keep in mind that the global capitalist system, as we have tried to explicate,
takes its governing force from its exploitation of life and death drives, that it is based on
our fear of death and consciousness of finitude, it becomes clearer why a subtraction of
death from life not only shakes, but also annihilates the foundations of capitalism.

3. Expulsion of the Negative and Affirmation of Life are Mutually Exclusive

To valorize negative sentiments or sad passionsthat is the
mystification on which nihilism bases its power. (Lucretius, then
Spinoza, already wrote decisive passages on this subject. Before
Nietzsche, they conceived philosophy as the power to affirm, as
the practical struggle against mystifications, as the expulsion of the
negative.)157
Purgatory, purification, extraction of the positive, expulsion of the negative,
projection, introjection... Throughout his discursive life Deleuze conceived of purification
of the self as the goal of literature. He believed that through an exposition of the evil
within one was healing the society. But this theory can only produce otherness as
negativity and that is almost exactly the opposite of what affirmative critique ought to be.
Nietzsches project of the expulsion of the negative is a recurrent theme in Deleuzes
157

Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone
Books, 2001), 84
229

writings. Like Nietzsche he thought that it is only through regression that one could be
purified and get outside the confines of the Cartesian cogito. Deleuzes attempts at
escaping from the Cartesian dualism, however, can only cause an interruption of the
splitting process and slides towards overcoming the split to attain oneness. Giving a voice
to the other creates the conditions of impossibility for the others finding his/her own
voice.
It is at this mobile and precise point, where all events gather
together in one that transmutation happens: this is the point at
which death turns against death; where dying is the negation of
death, and the impersonality of dying no longer indicates only the
moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment
when death loses itself in itself, and also the figure which the most
singular life takes on in order to substitute itself for me.158
With Deleuze it is always one dies rather than I die, or as the Cynic saying goes,
when there is death I am not, when I am there is no death. Instead of accepting the state
of being wounded as a perpetually renewed actuality, instead of affirming death within
life, the other within the self, Deleuze climbs over the walls of his wound, and looking
down on the others, he loses the ground beneath his feet, and eventually falls into the split
he was trying to get rid of.
A wound is incarnated or actualised in a state of things or of life:
but it is itself pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads
us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of

158

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 153
230

the wound in a higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality

always within a milieu (plane or field).159
Affirming the mutual inclusiveness of introversion and intersubjectivity means
preferring an a-sociality, what Blanchot calls being in a non-relation, to the symbolic
order. Blanchots attitude is exactly the opposite of the symbolic market society that
dissolves the most fundamental questions of being human in a pot of common sense. The
subject of the market society is continually in pursuit of increased strength and selfconfidence. And for that reason governed by what Nietzsche called the herd instinct, the
will to nothingness, this subject becomes a reactive and adaptive subject. The symbolic
order loses the ground beneath itself when and if the majority starts to see living with the
thought of death not only as a natural necessity, but also as something to be affirmed.
Death has an extreme and definite relation to me and my
body and is grounded in me, but it also has no relation to
me at allit is incorporeal and infinitive, impersonal,
grounded only in itself. On one side, there is the part of the
event which is realized and accomplished; on the other,
there is that part of the event which cannot realize its
accomplishment.160
4. Cont(r)action is not the same as imposing one order of meaning upon another
which is considered to be lacking in something essential to healthy living.
So I eventually arrive where I could possibly have arrived; the end of this voyage,
which is at the same time the beginning of another one. And here I find out that the more
affirmative ones attitude towards life gets the more fragile the contact with the other
159

Deleuze, Pure Immanence: A Life, 31-2

160

Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 151-152

231

becomes. But as the contact becomes more fragile and affirmation more difficult,
maintaining the conditions for the possibility of a perpetually recreated affirmative
cont(r)act becomes more essential to the continuation of healthy life of self in touch not
only with its own death but also with the death of the other.
Sometimes the only way to keep affirming is to affirm the fragility of the
affirmative cont(r)act itself. It is only by affirming a broken and irregularly beating heart
in its broken irregularity that one can relate to it. But to affirm this heart one must detach
oneself from it, not identify with it, not become broken and irregularly beating itself, so
that one can find in oneself the strength to undertake repairing the broken heart.
Affirmation of life as it is, I think, is only the beginning of a fragile and yet beautiful
friendship.
5. Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to
happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.161
We continually have to work on turning everything that happens to us in this life
into for the good. For everything good or bad to become for the good we have to affirm
that which has happened to us. But how are we going to affirm something so terrible that
nails us to a painful existence indefinitely? First of all, we have to accept that, that which
has happened is not changeable, it has already taken place and we cannot go back there to
unlive it.

But at the same time the meaning, value, and significance of what has

happened is never fully established. Only death accomplishes the events significance,
only through death is established the truth of what has happened to us.
For the Stoics one has to have a perfect understanding of the workings of cosmos
and nature to be able to live in harmony with the world surrounding one. It is such that
everything is a cause and an effect at the same time and everything is linked to one
161

Epictetus, The Encheiridion, trans. Nicholas P. White (Hackett: Cambridge, 1983), 13

232

another. Everything that happens causes other things to happen. To a certain extent what
happens to us is not in our control but at the same time if we know what the consequence
of a certain action would be we could choose what to do, and so what happens to us, to a
certain extent, becomes our own doing. We have to figure out how to act, which words to
use in the way of affecting the external world so as to maintain ourselves as an active
agent in any circumstance.162
Let us imagine an example. If we have done something so terribly wrong that it is
causing us great distress, before drowning in our sadness we have to find a way of
reading it in such a way as to turn it into something that was necessary for our present
and future happiness. If we let ourselves go after a disappointing incident, if we let things
happen to us and not do something to change the course of events we might as well find
ourselves in an irresolvable situation at the end, which would lead to madness and death.
At every moment throughout our lives we are confronted with obstacles that keep
us from accomplishing certain desired ends. And yet there is also always a certain
potential of accomplishing something even better because of the very obstacle that caused
the desired end to become unattainable. The Stoic solution to this problem is simple and
yet sophisticated.
So detach your aversion from everything not up to us, and transfer
it to what is against nature among the things that are up to us. And
for the time being eliminate desire completely, since if you desire
something that is not up to us, you are bound to be unfortunate,
and at the same time none of the things that are up to us, which it
would be good to desire, will be available to you.163
162
163

Epictetus, 11-3
Epictetus, 12
233

What we have here is not a total negation of desire but a rejection of certain
objects of desire that one must know from past experience are bad for us to desire. If we
want something to happen to us, something that would satisfy a certain desire, and if the
desired event cannot be accomplished through our actions then there is no point in
striving for the attainment of an unattainable object of desire. Instead one should make
the best of what is at hand and accomplish other events that render possible the
attainment of objects of desire that are within reach. If we dont know what and how to
work for, we get nothing out of life, find ourselves locked in a room on the door of which
death continually knocks.
Epictetus philosophy is a very practical one. In it we find ways of coping with the
difficulties of life. And it is adaptable to the present state of the human condition in which
we find ourselves face to face with the exploitation of the life drive and the death drive
through a manipulation of the mutual dependence of these two based on the ambiguous,
because a-symetrical, conflict inherent in the relationship between them.
If we know not how to choose what to desire, if we allow the objects of our desire
to be shaped by the capable hands of the big Other represented by the global capitalists,
we also let the ways in which we desire be determined by a source other than ourselves,
hence become puppets trying to satisfy an external force rather than ourselves and our
lovers. We have to know what to desire and how to make it happen, otherwise nothing
happens and where there is nothing happening there can be neither creativity nor
communication; for what is one to create or communicate if there is nothing to create and
communicate.
Once it is realized that there is nothing other than nothing to be struggled against,
it becomes clearer how it would be possible to detach oneself from external
234

circumstances and act in the way of maintaining an impersonal vision of what happens
around us. One dissociates not the events themselves, but dissociates oneself from the
events surrounding one. The Stoic indifference requires a subject in the form of an
impersonal consciousness who maintains its dissociating function at all times. For this
dissociation to take place, however, the subject has to know how to associate events that
have led to the present, that is, one has to immerse oneself in the plurality of the past
events, and extract from this multiplicity a combination of events so as to enable oneself
to constitute oneself as an autonomous, free agent. This attitude emphasizes the
importance of each instant. At every instant we have to act in such a way as to make the
future better than the past. And this brings us to Nietzsches eternal return. According to
Nietzsche, we have to act at every present moment in such a way that we will regret
nothing in the future. Every present is an eternal moment in-itself and it is at times in our
control to turn the present into for-itself, and at times it is not.
As you aim such great goals, remember that you must not
undertake them by acting moderately, but must let some things go
completely and postpone others for the time being.164
So, at every present we have to consider the possibilities from different angles and
decide which way to go and which way not to go as if we were immortal. What Epictetus
seems to be suggesting is that once a choice is made the only way to make it work for us
is to push it to its limit where it either turns against us or against itself and creates another
possibility of choice. Epictetus is not in favour of an individuality that would be
constituted through moderation, but in a subject that would be indifferent to lack or
excess. In Epictetus world there is no lack or excess; what there is lacks nothing and
nothing in what there is is excessive. If one is satisfied by what there is with its lacks and
164

Epictetus, 11
235

excesses one needs no moderation of ones actions, for there is nothing lacking or
excessive to be moderated in ones actions. Lack or excess can only be determined by a
whole external to the already existing. But there is only that which is, which never lacks
anything in relation to something outside itself. The concepts of lack and excess belong to
the world of metaphysics which exists only in imagination.
6. To What End Last Words? To What End Suffering...
Throughout this thesis I have tried to develop a mode of critique in and through
which nothing is excluded and/or determined. This reflective mode of critique itself
enabled me to situate myself in the middle of the reflective and the determinative modes
of judgment. The critical mode employed in this thesis is still context-bound to a certain
extent, and yet it tries to restrictively dissociate itself from the predetermined context,
rather than freely associate within it. A new field is opened, the conditions are created for
the possibility of a decision beyond the Law of Militarist Capitalism and the Welfare
State driven by and driving the exploitation of mortality on a massive scale. There is this
transcendental field that requires a non-mortal mode of being in the world, neither for nor
against it, but indifferent to it in such a way as to turn its own alienation from mortality
into its driving force in its attempt to demolish the faculty of finite judgment and create
the conditions of possibility out of the conditions of impossibility for an infinite judgment
to take place beyond the subject/object of a Law that is mortal, all too mortal.
A truth comes into being through those subjects who
maintain a resilient fidelity to the consequences of an event
that took place in a situation but not of it. Fidelity, the
commitment to truth, amounts to something like a
disinterested enthusiasm, absorption in a compelling task or
236

cause, a sense of elation, of being caught up in something

that transcends all petty, private or material concerns.165
The immortal subject within and without the pre-dominant symbolic order is not
only the cause, but also the effect of its own alienation from mortal life. This regulatory
idea of immortality, which is also a constitutive illusion, is inspired by the poststructuralist theme of becoming non-identical as we see in Deleuze and Derrida. If one
could become non-identical, why would one not also become non-mortal? If one could
become alienated from ones identity, why would one not also become alienated from
ones mortality? Why not become immortal so as to become capable of criticizing the
exploitations of this mortal, all too mortal life? But what motivated me to take
immortality as a virtual mode of being was Badious theory of infinity which aimed at
secularizing the concept of truth. Badious technique of secularizing the truth is inspired
by the 19th century mathematician Georg Cantors technique of secularizing the infinite.
As Badiou claims, the secularization of infinity started with Cantor who stated that there
was not one, but many infinities varying in size and intensity. From then onwards it
became possible to link Deleuzes concepts of impersonal consciousness and
transcendental empiricism with Badious theory of infinity and Kants assertion that for
reflective judgement to take place and turn the object into a subject a transcendental
ground is necessary. Now I can say that for me a transcendental ground is necessary only
to the extent that it enables the subject to shake the foundation of its own mode of being
and opens a field for immanent critique to take place. In other words, the untimely
indifference of immortality is required in order to actively engage in an exposition of the
exploitation of mortality in this time.
165

Peter Hallward, Introduction in Alain Badiou, Ethics (London: Verso, 2002), x

237

I dont know if it is worth mentioning that in this time we are all slaves and yet
some slaves dominate the others. Where time goes no one knows. There are necessary
illusions in this life, some for life, some not. Both the extreme belief in civilized progress
and barbaric regress are good for nothing. These two are now in the process of being left
behind. A third possibility of developmental process is emerging in the form of a
becoming-reconciled which is based on the recognition of the otherness of the other as it
is, that is, prior to the additions and the subtractions imposed upon the self and the other,
nature and culture, life and death. For a non-normative and progressive work it is
necessary for the participants to become capable of making distinctions between their
natures and cultures, their cliniques and critiques. It is a matter of realizing that theory
and practice are always already reconciled and yet the only way to actualise this
reconciliation passes through carrying it out and across by introducing a split between the
subject of statement (the enunciated) and the subject of enunciation.
It is indeed true that sometimes it takes a long journey to get there, where one
eventually got to, and realise that one is other than one thinks itself to be. Apparently the
numbers indeed start with zero and continue with two, but it takes time to realise this
actuality and become capable of actualising this reality. Perhaps we should indeed know
that absolute reconciliation is impossible and yet still strive to reconcile ourselves as
much as we can to all the living and the dead.

238

AFTERWORD
1. The Unhappy Consciousness, or, Stoics and Sceptics locked in Kleins projectionintrojection mechanism
In Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel attempts to write a mythology of creation and a
creation of mythology in one simultaneous movement in two opposite directions at once.
Intimately implicating the process of creation in error and misrecognition,
Phenomenology of Spirit is a narrative of the subjects endless process of negotiating with
the world and with itself; in this context the subject is a process of settling accounts
without end.
Hegels first object of thought is the thought of the object itself. For the
negotiation of thought with the self and the world to begin taking its course, the subject
has to take its own thought as that which is the other within itself, that is, as its own
object. Through this separation between the subject and the object the subject becomes
capable of seeing itself through its own thought and its own thought through itself. The
thought of the subject is at the same time the object of thought. Thought as the subject
and the object at the same time journeys through consciousness towards the unconscious.
As soon as the subject becomes conscious of its own division within itself it becomes the
Unhappy Consciousness. The Unhappy Consciousness is a consciousness that is
conscious of its own unconsciousness. It is not only conscious of itself as the unconscious
inherent in consciousness, but is itself that consciousness in which it inheres as the
unconscious. It is a consciousness that knows itself to be other than what it thinks itself to
be and yet being conscious of itself as always already other than itself it is never present
to itself. It is a (w)hole in its own consciousness.
But although the Unhappy Consciousness does not have the
enjoyment of this presence, it has at the same time advanced
239

beyond pure thinking in so far as this is the abstract thinking of

Stoicism which turns its back on individuality altogether, and
beyond the merely unsettled thinking of Scepticismwhich is in
fact only individuality in the form of an unconscious contradiction
and ceaseless movement. It has advanced beyond both of these; it
brings

and

holds

together

pure

thinking

and

particular

individuality, but has not yet risen to that thinking where

consciousness as a particular individuality is reconciled with pure
thought itself. It occupies rather this intermediate position where
abstract thinking is in contact with the individuality of
consciousness qua individuality. The Unhappy Consciousness is
this contact; it is the unity of pure thinking and individuality; also
it knows itself to be this thinking individuality or pure thinking,
and knows the Unchangeable itself essentially as an individuality.
But what it does not know is that this its object, the Unchangeable,
which it knows essentially in the form of individuality, is its own
self, is itself the individuality of consciousness.166
The Unhappy Consciousness consists in and of two separate but contiguous parts:
Stoicism and Scepticism. Knowing itself to be both and none of these at the same time,
the Unhappy Consciousness turns towards the Unchangeable, of which Hegel identifies a
particular manifestation appropriate to the stage of the Unhappy Consciousness. What the
Unhappy Consciousness wants is to see itself as part of the Unchangeable, to realize that
there is something unchangeable for itself and in itself. But the only unchangeable is the
perpetually changing way of change itself and so the Unhappy Consciousness, to become
166

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1977), 130-1
240

the Unchangeable itself, turns against itself and changes; it becomes for and against itself,
which it always already was, thus actualizing the Unchangeable which is its state of being
divided against itself. Perpetually changing, it is unchangeable, and again changes itself
and becomes changeable to remain unchangeable.
The middle term is self-consciousness which splits into the
extremes; and each extreme is this exchanging of its own
determinateness and an absolute transition into its opposite.167
Each self-consciousness is divided within itself. It is divided within itself, against
itself and the other self-consciousness. For it to be able to actualise its self-consciousness
it has to be recognized by the other self-consciousness. But the other self-consciousness
is itself in the same situation. Without one another none is self-consciousness. To proceed
from consciousness to self-consciousness they need the other which is always already
within themselves. What they need to do is to recognize the other within themselves for
them to be recognized as they are to themselves. For the self to be what it is for itself it
first has to become what it is for the other, that is, one loses itself in the other within itself
in order to find oneself dismembered.
Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled
ferment of {the divine} substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil
over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding they
become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep;
and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their
sleep, is nothing but dreams.168

167
168

Hegel, 112
Hegel, 6
241

Hegels is a way of writing that proceeds through sustaining the conditions for the
possibility of a productive interaction between the conscious and the unconscious. His
narrative process is driven by forces that Hegel himself produces out of an activity
creating and sustaining a tension between the conscious and the unconscious forces
within himself. Hegel never stops writing against himself. And yet this writing against
himself of Hegel is at the same time his writing for himself. By writing not for the other
but before the other he becomes capable of keeping an eye on himself through the eye of
the other within himself. The eye of the other that keeps an eye on the eye of the self is
simultaneously interior and exterior to Hegel. By being addressed to himself in such a
way as to be addressed to the other Hegels writing becomes the fragile contact and a
simultaneous separation between the self and the other.
As he puts it in his On the Genealogy of Morality, for Nietzsche, too, there are
masters and slaves, which he calls active and reactive forces, but those who play the role
of the masters are in fact the slaves and the slaves the masters. So what Nietzsche wants
to say is that the slaves dominate the masters because of the false values upon which
human life is built. Reactive forces are the slaves who occupy the master position and
active forces are the masters who occupy the slave position. It is always the reactive
forces who win because their reactions are contagious and it is extremely easy for them to
multiply themselves and degenerate the others. The active forces, however, although they
are the strong ones, are always crushed under the false value system created by the
reactive forces. If Hegel is saying that everything eventually turns into its opposite and
the roles are reversed only after a struggle to death, Nietzsche is saying that the roles are
always already reversed and the way to set things right, rather than passing through
reversing the roles, passes through a revaluation of all values on the way to a new game.
242

Now I will attempt to think through the separation between Hegel and Nietzsche
by imagining the way in which Nietzsche could have possibly read Hegel now. These
words by Nietzsche are addressed directly to Hegel:
Will to truth, you who are wisest call that which impels you and
fills you with lust?
A will to the thinkability of all beings: this I call your will. You
want to make all being thinkable, for you doubt with well-founded
suspicion that it is already thinkable. But it shall yield and bend for
you. Thus your will wants it. It shall become smooth and serve the
spirit as its mirror and reflection. That is your whole will, you who
are wisest: a will to powerwhen you speak of good and evil too,
and of valuations. You still want to create the world before which
you can kneel: that is your ultimate hope and intoxication.169
Nietzsche reads Hegel in terms of the disintegration between Hegels actions and
intentions. In a way Nietzsche implies that Hegel is the very unhappy consciousness he is
trying to overcome. Hegel himself is interpreting the unhappy consciousness as a split
subject whose actions and intentions do not form a coherent unity. This means that
Nietzsche is trying to criticize Hegel with Hegels very own logic of conceptualization of
the subject as split.
In both Hegel and Nietzsche the relationship between the subject and the object is
problematized. In both cases the resistance to contamination by the object of thought
through its introjection is not only hand in hand but also drives and is driven by the fear
of being contaminated by the object. There is, however, no fear of contaminating the
169

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from The portable Nietzsche, ed. and
trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 225
243

object through projecting onto it that which is always already introjected from it, namely
that it is a narrative of the processes of projection-introjection mechanism.
As the narrative of the relationship between the subject and the object,
Phenomenolgy of Spirit, against which, according to Deleuzes reading of Nietzsche in
Nietzsche and Philosophy, Nietzsche was writing, is itself written for and against itself,
and is indeed a narrative of the unhappy consciousnesss difference from itself.
For Nietzsche, the subjects creations with and through the objects surrounding
him/her is driven by a movement towards self-destruction in that the subject relates to the
objects it creates in a way that is against itself. An example of that at present would be in
terms of the relationship between humanity and technology. If the subject is being
governed by fear he/she will see technology as bad in itself, hence taking on a paranoid
attitude towards technology, ignore its good uses, reject it completely, and eventually
actualize what he/she was not even afraid of; death. But the opposite is equally true in
that if the subject has no trace of fear within, then he/she will lose himself/herself in what
he/she creates and actualize what he had no fear of.
Negativity gives birth to negativity. Negativities form an infinite chain chaining
the subject to an infinite process of regress. Aggression is negative and as it multiplies
itself it destroys both the object and the subject. Reactive attitudes are produced by and
produce aggression. It is very easy for aggression to dominate the world and/but it is very
difficult to sustain the conditions for the possibility of channelling aggression towards
healthy conflict without antagonism.
In Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel presents Stoics and Sceptics as the two
constitutive parts of the unhappy consciousness. Now let us try and imagine a subject as
defined in the subtitle. Situated in the present context, a subject as the two sides of the
244

same coin that contained a sceptic and a stoic side at the same time would be the
Nietzschean/Hegelian subject par excellence in that it would see everything in terms of a
dualism, or a struggle between the forces of good and evil. In fact he would himself
become the stage on which a confrontation between good and evil takes place. He would
read every sign in the external world in terms of this struggle to the point of replacing the
external reality with his internally constituted reality. What he introjects would be always
already his own creation, which he would still consider to be whats really going on
outside, and consequently would himself become the nodal point of the conflict between
the internal and the external, the psychic and the somatic.
The sceptic exhausts the projection-introjection mechanism to the point of
turning against all claims to know the truth, whereas the stoic refuses to take part in the
projection-introjection mechanism. It is not that the sceptic sees evil everywhere but that
he projects the evil within and onto the evil without that he has introjected from the
external world in the first place. As for the stoic, he is so indifferent that he thinks there is
no gap between the internal and the external worlds and so there can be no such thing as a
projection-introjection mechanism that would simultaneously be the cause and the effect
of a struggle between good and evil.
On one pole of this interactivity which constitutes contemporary nihilism is the
reactive sceptic and on the other the indifferent stoic. Neither of these are satisfying for
themselves nor satisfying in-themselves to produce reconciliation which would be called
an intersubjectivity. A reactive force sees everything against itself and an indifferent force
sees no point in engaging in an intercourse in the way of an interaction with a reactive
sceptic who sees stoics as nihilists.

245

Sceptics and stoics are, by being against one another, feeding neither themselves
nor the other, but contributing to the production of otherness as negativity, hence taking
part in the setting of the very vicious trap in which they find themselves against each
other and out of which they both come dismembered. They are both finding themselves
locked in an agonizing process, which is destroying both of them. It is impossible for one
to survive without the other. Although the problem is the projection-introjection
mechanism inherent in them, they are looking for the source of their maladies outside
themselves. We are projecting all our bad qualities onto the others and then accusing
them of being negative towards us. In turn they are giving birth to the negativity of the
other, or otherness as negativity. The source of the negative within and without us is
being created by us since we introject what we have projected and inversely.
***
One tries to fill the gap created by the absence of truth with the words which
he/she attempts to construct an explanation which makes sense, and which is called
knowledge. It is for this reason that knowledge emerges as the negation and destruction
of the truth, that truth being nothing, or in a Lacanian interpretation the Real. So
knowledge is like a veil put on the void to cover the meaninglessness of life. That veil
which serves as a cover from the nothingness behind itself is what we know as
knowledge. The tragic consciousness is conscious of this fictional quality of knowledge
and knows too, that this is something that has to be done for life to win over death. But
this consciousness simultaneously carries within itself an unnamable joy and happiness,
what Lacan calls jouissance. This unhappy consciousness does not negate life, on the
contrary, it affirms it, it is the motor of affirmative becoming that turns a state of mind,
unhappy consciousness, into a mode of being, being affirmative. The figure that feels
246

knowledge as the deformation of truth most deeply is Dionysus. By whipping his own
pain like whipping horses running a carriage, Dionysus turns his impossibilities into
possibilities, his incapability into his capability. An Ancient Greek God, Dionysus, unlike
Hamlet, does not get caught up in desperation and become passive because of his tragic
knowledge. On the contrary, Dionysus considers loss of consciousness, drunkenness and
dancing to the rhythm of cosmos meritable actions. Unlike Hamlet Dionysus doesnt
become inactive but still his actions are doomed to be lost in the labyrinths of death drive.
With his excessive destructivity Dionysus is only one of the steps on the way to creating
something new. If Apollos creative and ordering actions that give a form to the chaos and
turn the unconscious drives into conscious desire dont intervene, however, Dionysus
self-destructive passage through the void, his unconscious exploration of the world of
drives, do not mean a thing. Apollo carries out the creativity phase of this passage
through the process of change towards the new by giving a form to Dionysus formless
insights. The attainment of the impersonal consciousness of the creator can only be
possible by this process of change carried out by co-operative interaction of Apollo and
Dionysus. Human helplessness in the face of death and nothingness can only be
overcome by a special form of relationship between the creative/destructive powers of
Apollo/Dionysus.
We are familiar with these ideas from Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy. For
someone to write these he must be in a deep depression. Nietzsche whose writings carry
the stamp of his pain and suffering never said anything like creativity requires pain and
suffering. For Nietzsche the creative process necessarily bears within itself a certain pain.
When he says that which does not kill me renders me stronger, what Nietzsche wants to
mean is that rather than fall into despair and hopelessness in the face of the bad things
247

that happen to us, we should keep in mind that that which has happened to us will gain its
meaning in time, so with this knowledge in mind we should try to act in such a way as to
make this bad thing gain a positive meaning in time. That is, relate to the bad thing in
such a way that it will have happened for the good in the future. Yes, this terrible thing
has happened to me, and yet I shall act so as to make this terrible thing that has happened
to me and which I cannot change render me stronger rather than weaker. So this is how
Nietzsche becomes a philosopher not striving for pain and suffering, but welcomes pain
and suffering as they come, and knows that they are not to be excluded from life of which
inescapable consequences they are. Nietzsche is not saying that suffering is the cause of
creativity, rather, Nietzsche is saying that the creative person is he who suffers a lot, but
suffering is not the motor of creativity. Perhaps if we try to say the exact opposite of what
Nietzsche says we understand more clearly what he means: That pain and suffering
renders the subject stronger, so it is a must that one brings as much calamities upon
oneself as possible in the way of more and greater sufferings.
Nietzsche is not only not in favour of killing the self or the other, he is also
obviously against self/other destruction. This resistance to death is driven by the will to
power, which affirms life in all its inconsistencies, surprises, incompleteness, finitude,
with its happiness and sadness, the bad things and the good things in it, as it, with all its
inner-conflicts and paradoxes, is.
2. A Conversation Around Nietzsche Between a Stoic and a Sceptic
Stoic: I found some interesting stuff as I was messing about today, you may have come
across it before; Nietzsche responds to Flauberts idea that one can only think and write
while one is sitting by saying that only those thoughts we think while we walk are worthy
of thinking. Unfortunately at the moment we are in the position of Flaubert, we will have
248

to think and talk as we sit. But we could as well have talked as we walked. Perhaps we
would have had problems with recording what we said, but still, when you think about it,
it would be great if we were on the hills with a third party to put down what we say.
Sceptic: I dont think whats important is whether you sit or walk as you think. I dont
know how Plato used to think, but I think I know that Aristotle used to walk a lot.
Stoic: Heidegger liked walking. Who else is there from the walkers? Nietzsche is one.
Anyway, I want us to talk about our personal experiences of Nietzsche a little bit. How
did you come across Nietzsche, did you experience him differently in different periods of
your life? I was thinking about that this morning, I met Nietzsche quite early in life. It
was a crooked encounter of course, as is usually the case in those ages, but this encounter
had a peculiarity to it. Perhaps the first reading is the most truthful reading.
Sceptic: It is difficult to feel the same excitement later on.
Stoic: One does not know the context that well at first. So the text is free floating, one can
invest it with almost any meaning one wants, a kind of projective identification operates
which doesnt always have fruitful consequences.
Sceptic: And yet sometimes it does. One has no idea about the context at all. One doesnt
even know that there is such a thing as context. I dont know which one of his books you
read first but I read Zarathustra. It came as a shock to me; it wasnt like anything I had
ever read before, a total confusion. It was out of the question to agree or disagree, I
remember having been crushed under the book. And as you said, then you dont know the
context, where he is coming from and where he is heading towards and all that, and all
meaning remains hung up in the air. You cant situate it, it was like a burning meteor
coming towards me and I couldnt do anything other than stare at it blankly.

249

Stoic: I dont exactly remember from where I started Nietzsche, but as far as I can
remember it was an unauthorized French edition of some fragmentary writings. I was
talking about my problems with one of my teachers, thoughts were circulating in my
mind, and when I tried to express myself not much made sense. My teacher gave me
some names, one of which was Nietzsche. He said German philosophers gave a lot of
thought to anxiety causing problems of life, their concerns were very similar to your
anxieties; Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger. So I checked out Nietzsche and as I said
it was like a crash, a way of expression I had never come across before, an attitude so
extraordinary Its only now I realize that I was undergoing a very dangerous
experience. The danger with Nietzsche is, you know, I had a period of reading Nietzsche
through other writers. When I was in my twenties I read Deleuzes Nietzsche,
Klossowskis Nietzsche, Blanchots Nietzsche, and all kinds of other Nietzsches, others
Nietzsches. In a way their attitudes served as a kind of directory, they were guides to
Nietzsche, they open paths as they close some others, and yet they teach you what and
how to look for, what really matters in Nietzsche, but in another way they deprive you of
the possibility of one to one, direct encounter with Nietzsche. I remained under the
influence of what I had seen through those glasses for a long time.
Sceptic: Did you keep on reading Nietzsche in-between your periods of depression?
Stoic: I was reading, but always within the fields they opened, not beyond their horizon. I
still didnt have my perspective on Nietzsche. And after that period came to an end, the
period of reading Nietzsche from the others perspectives, I didnt read Nietzsche for at
least ten years. I had a really serious depression in 1988. I looked for remedies in the
books; I looked in vain for therapeutic writers. I looked at Kafka, Dostoyevski, I didnt
want to read them, after three-four pages I threw them away, it was all very upsetting. But
250

when I discovered Ecce Homo, I considered it as the deliverance of my salvation, it really

came as a relief, and I finished the book in one sitting during a cold and rainy night. To
some extent it cured me. When after a while I recovered completely I turned back to
Nietzsche only to find out what we all know: one understands what one had read at
twenty in a completely different way when one gets to thirty because one changes and
with one the books meaning changes. The text remains the same perhaps, but we move
on to another place and another time.
Sceptic: Even the meanings of words change, free from us, independently of our personal
change.
Stoic: In different periods of my life Nietzsche had different effects on me. When I look
back now, to what extent can Nietzsche be considered a philosopher, how far out is he
from ordinary philosophy? Of course it would be very difficult not to consider Nietzsche
a philosopher, but there are many cases where you see academic philosophers turn a blind
eye on him, but thats their problem of course, its their loss, not Nietzsches. And the
reason why he has been so influential especially outside academic philosophical
discourse, in literary, critical and cultural studies for instance, is that he has written such
exciting texts that one may die of pleasure. You dont get the same effect from Hegel for
instance, you dont die from the magnificence, the splendour Nietzsche has a massive
poetic potential. Not that Im fond of all of what I have just said of him, of course
Sceptic: But I do get immense pleasure from reading Hegel. I even find him extremely
humorous at times. Phenomenology of Spirit gives me hope, when Im too desperate it
even fills me with an irrational bliss. Cant you hear the laughter in Hegel? Or maybe its
just my laughter which I think comes from Hegel. I can see your point about Nietzsche
though, he is much more affective. You can read Nietzsche isolated from his
251

philosophical thoughts, as a writer of literary texts, texts on life itself rather than life
reduced to knowledge. It is Nietzsches style that gives you the kicks. How about
Nietzsches poems?
Stoic: To be honest, I dont like them.
Sceptic: I agree, but there are many admirers of his poems too. Some even see his poetry
as prophecy, a kind of expansive message from beyond. But I think Nietzsches prose is
much more beautiful, especially when read in German.
Stoic: Perhaps. Unfortunately I dont have the privilege of reading original Nietzsche, I
havent had that privilege.
Sceptic: Thats the dangerous aspect, he can tempt you, put you off the rails, as he has
done and continues to do to many.
Stoic: He has quite an asphyxiating effect. I cant think of Nietzsche having an ordinary
effect on anyone; he either makes you hate him, or love him with a great passion, at least
at the beginning.
Sceptic: I believe my attitude was a bit more cautious than yours. I didnt really get into
Nietzsche, or perhaps I should say Nietzsche didnt penetrate me as much as he did you.
Nietzsche came to me naturally and is now in the process of leaving me naturally. I
havent had a Nietzschean drama, he has never been a writer I turned towards out of
hunger and thirst for a way out; I tried to comprehend him and when I finally thought I
comprehended him I realized that it is almost impossible to come to a total understanding
of Nietzsche, for if one does figure out what Nietzsche really wants to say one becomes a
victim of Nietzsche and hates him, and with him, hates oneself. I have never really come
to a total understanding of Nietzsche, because he disapproves of so many things, and it is
impossible to know what exactly it is that he is disapproving of, so you see, it becomes
252

difficult to follow his story. I was a Wagnerian when I was twenty for instance, and I
couldnt see why he was so reactively critical of Wagner. I had no idea about the history
of the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche, and without this background story you
dont get Nietzsches point in Nietzsche contra Wagner. There is always a lot more going
on behind what Nietzsche writes than one could possibly imagine, he is the iceberg and
his writings are his tips.
Stoic: You still are a bit Wagnerian, you like it that way?
Sceptic: Yes I like it Nietzsche objects to the whole of European thought from Plato
through Hegel and Schopenhauer and why he does so is linked to his personal
experiences of this collective history of European thought. And we are not born with the
knowledge of Nietzsches experiences. His critique of Christianity, I dont know, Im not
a believer, but I dont approve of Nietzsches reactive aggressiveness as he attacks the
Christian God. As I said one has to know Nietzsches life but how possible is that? Unlike
you I have never read the secondary literature on Nietzsche, Im only familiar with the
names you mentioned earlier, but I dont know what they are up to with Nietzsche. For
me Nietzsche is one of those who do philosophy departing from a wound, from a deepseated internal problem The wound is internal to Nietzsche but the source of this
wound is external, so you see, he is in-between. He attacks both sides at the same time,
there is a profound neither/nor relationship, an endless struggle between the life drive and
the death drive in Nietzsches books. As for Hegel, Im not so sure what kind of a man he
was. His philosophy doesnt seem to give me the kicks as you say. But to me Hegel is
sobering, and that is what I require. In Kants books you see everything divided and
subdivided into sections and subsections. And you see Kants idea is there in three books.
I find the life philosophy-academic philosophy distinction ridiculous and luxurious for
253

our times. It deprives us of many great philosophers. Nietzsches is neither academic nor
life, but a kind of open philosophy; philosophy without the final judgment. Nietzsche has
never said and will never have said his last word.
Stoic: Never?
Sceptic: And that there is no such last word or final judgment is itself Nietzsches last
word and final judgment. It is with Nietzsche that we come to realize this paradoxical
situation, this vicious cycle, within which we have come to be entrapped.
Stoic: But Nietzsche also makes us ask, what would be the price paid to escape from this
vicious cycle?
Sceptic: Thats indeed another thing that he does. It is precisely because of these endless
questions leading to one another, each question the answer of another, and this
incompleteness of his philosophy is only one of the reasons that make Nietzsche
attractive for many. The second is this: Nietzsche has four-five teachings, the first one is,
which for me is the most important, that knowledge is perspectival by nature. As soon
as he says this, his philosophy becomes an opening up to a new field for thought and life.
Everyone can enter Nietzsches new space and take what they want, it is like a toolbox.
There is something for Hitler in that work, something else for Bataille, for Heidegger,
Freud, so you see how clear it all becomes in this context, what he means when he says
on the title-page of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A book for no one and everyone. You can
translate this as a book for everyone who will understand but at the same time for no one,
since no one can completely understand what exactly Nietzsche means. This formula is
applicable to his philosophy as a (w)hole, a philosophy for none and all at the same time.
And there is no (w)hole of Nietzsches philosophy to be comprehended as a (w)hole
anyway. This attitude would reduce Nietzsche to its bare bones when in fact it is a very
254

fleshy writing. It wouldnt be fair on Nietzsche. Mine is a stance from which I try to
justify Nietzsche, save him. It is the tendency of most readers of Nietzsche to be his
advocate. And yet I now realize that this attitude, too, is not so true to the spirit of
Nietzsche. And this is the reason why I distanced myself from Nietzsche, after witnessing
what has been happening in the world for the last one hundred years, since Nietzsches
death. You might as well read there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, as there can be
no philosophy after Auschwitz. Or you at least become compelled to admit, after
Auschwitz it becomes very difficult, almost impossible to unconditionally affirm
Nietzsches philosophy. You might, and you should, feel the need to introduce a distance
between yourself and Nietzsche.
Stoic: Another paradoxical situation emerges here, for Nietzsche is himself against
himself in this respect and on this subject.
Sceptic: Yes, he is indeed.
Stoic: And this indicates a self-deconstructive reading at work, that is, you are already
deconstructing your own reading as you read Nietzsche.
Sceptic: But isnt this a natural outcome of philosophical thinking? I think Nietzsches
grandest illusion was his excessive self-assurance, a pathological self-confidence which
led him not to use his critical eye in relation to himself as much as he did in relation to
others. He perspectivizes truth but he never situates himself in the nineteenth century as a
priest who had been influenced by the likes of Wagner and Schopenhauer; he never
comes to terms with his finitude, and so he never manages to reconcile himself to life.
Stoic: In 1889, when his passage to the other side is semi-complete he is about forty-five.
Sceptic: Yes.

255

Stoic: The most interesting aspect of his work is its posthumousness. He left behind a
multiplicity of texts in complete silence and yet all his work, this multiplicity of texts, is
itself an unceasing and singular voice at times causing nausea. When one is looking at
this oeuvre one wonders what kind of a will to power is Nietzsches, its not clear, some
say it should be translated as will towards power. I think will to power and will to
nothingness are one and the same thing. Will towards power and being towards death are
the two constituent parts of becoming what one always already is. And what use of a will
to truth if it is not in the service of becoming true to ones being. Perhaps if his work had
not been interrupted by illness, he, and we with him, would have been better able to make
sense of these circular movements of thought.
Sceptic: Nietzsches working method involves taking notes as he walked And then
revising those notes
Stoic: Organize those thoughts, put them in order? But its different when Zarathustra
speaks. He wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra locked in a room, sitting in a chair in front of a
table on the mountains after his devastating Lou Andreas-Salom experience. There is a
close relation between aphorisms and steps, fragmentary writing and walking. It is the
same in the case of other aphorism writers, there are flashes of insight involved, always
fragmentary, little thoughts complete in themselves and yet to be formulated in relation to
one another. Nietzsches process of thinking is itself discontinuous, fragmentary; its an
attempt to give birth to partial objects without relation to an external idea of wholeness.
As soon as something strikes him he feels as though if he doesnt put it down
immediately he never will. And since he thinks about the same thing from different
perspectives through a period of time, the result is a plurality of partial objects all
somehow linked to one another rather than to a whole outside them. He didnt have time
256

to make sense of all he thought. His thought was larger than his life. He used to write so
rapidly but still his infinite speed of thought always left his writing behind.
Sceptic: If only he had lived longer and thought with less speed.
Stoic: Perhaps he could have finished the work of his life in a much more precise way. If
he were able to write a second Ecce Homo at sixty years old, he could have survived his
thought. But of course Im assuming too much here.
Sceptic: Actually it is good to throw some light on where Nietzsche is coming from and
where he is heading towards. It makes visible the great potential of Nietzsches thought;
explicates the possibilities of new ways of thinking and living it has to offer.
Stoic: In a new light everything becomes other than itself.
Sceptic: Plato criticized his own concept of the Idea later in life. Perhaps if Nietzsche had
lived longer he would have had a critical look at his earlier work.
Stoic: The other day I had a look at On The Genealogy of Morality as a preparation for
our conversation. In it I saw Nietzsche thinking about two hundred years ahead of his
time. And this prophetic stance is not very common among philosophers. Usually poets
tend to tell of the future.
Sceptic: Poets do tend to have messianic expectations.
Stoic: Yes, poets too operate at messianic levels but Nietzsche is assured that what he
thinks will take place in the future will actually take place; he believes in the truth of
what he assumes. And worst of all, we now see that what he thought would happen is
really happening. Have a look at what he says:
What meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us
this will to truth has come to a consciousness of itself as a
problem? It is from the will to truths becoming conscious of
257

itself that from now onthere is no doubt about itmorality will

gradually perish: that great spectacle in a hundred acts that is
reserved for Europes next two centuries, the most terrible, most
questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles170
He sees the rise of Nihilism. And we see him say this in Genealogy published in
November 1887. It has been 117 years and we can say that his prophecy has proved to be
true for the first 117 years out of 200. On this account we can bet that this truth will
increasingly maintain its truth status in the remaining 83 years. Looking backwards he
tells of the future. With a messianic force he writes Ecce Homo in which he proclaims
himself Christ and Dionysus. What he means by that self-fashioning is that he has passed
across the Nihilism, went through the will to nothingness and reached the point after the
fantasy is traversed where Christ and Dionysus confront one another. But Nietzsche never
says that he is the overman. Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, fashions himself as the one who
remains the man who wants to die. In Gay Science we see the theme of Gods death
merging with the story of a madman wandering around with his lamp, looking for God.
He distinguishes two forms of Nihilism: one is an active nihilism he associates with
destruction, the other is an exhausted and passive nihilism he identifies as Buddhism.
Sceptic: Perhaps its true; today we know the West is turning towards the East.
Stoic: He sees not one, but two distinct futures of a Nihilist Europe. But I dont really get
what he means when he says he has himself overcome nihilism. Has he really overcome
nihilism or is it just wishful thinking?
Sceptic: I dont know whether he has or he has not overcome nihilism, but what I can say
concerning why he thinks in that way is this: In a nut-shell nihilism is the absence of
170

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and

Alan J. Swensen (Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), 117
258

where and why, or direction and intention. Nietzsche is convinced that he is

showing humanity a new direction towards which to head. His project of revaluing the
values is itself an attempt at overcoming nihilism, but this attempt only partially
overcomes nihilism, for even after all the values are devalued there remains the new
values to be created out of the ruins of the old. Revaluation cannot be completed unless
destruction is left behind and creation takes its course.
Stoic: Absolutely. Nihilism is necessary for the devaluation of values, but should be left
behind before revaluing the values. So nihilism is a useful tool in turning the existing
order against itself but when it comes to creating the new it is nothing other than an
enemy. Nietzsches discourse is almost a Marxist discourse without Marxist terminology.
To see this aspect of Nietzsche more clearly let me give you a brief account of the masterslave relationship in Hegel and Nietzsche. For Hegel everyone is a slave and some slaves,
out of a dissatisfaction with slavery, fight to death for mastery, win the fight, and through
recognition by the slaves as the masters, become masters, and dominate the slaves.
Dialectical process, however, does not end there and in the next stage, and as history has
shown us in Marxs words, since in time everything turns into its opposite, slaves
eventually become masters. Whereas for Nietzsche from the beginning there are masters
and slaves, which he calls active and reactive forces, but the ones who play the role of
masters are in fact the slaves and the slaves the masters. So what Nietzsche wants to say
is that slaves dominate the masters because of the false values upon which human life is
built. Reactive forces are the slaves who occupy the master position and active forces are
the masters who occupy the slave position. It is always the reactive forces who win
because their reactions are contagious and it is extremely easy for them to multiply
themselves and degenerate the others. The active forces, however, although they are the
259

strong ones, are always crushed under the false value system created by the reactive
forces. If Hegel is saying that everything eventually turns into its opposite and the roles
are reversed only after a struggle to death, Nietzsche is saying that the roles are always
already reversed and the way to set things right, rather than passing through reversing the
roles, passes through a revaluation of all values on the way to a new game. How would
you respond to that?
Sceptic: Well, Nietzsche looks at things otherwise. Through eternal recurrence everything
is continually inverted into the spotlight and everything turns into something other than
itself in time. So he comes to the conclusion that everything is so reversed that the weak
wins. Thats what he sees as the outcome of nihilism. In Nietzsches world what everyone
understands from improvement is in fact the opposite of the real meaning of
improvement. Look what he says,
One should at least be clear about the expression be of use. If by
this one intends to express that such a system of treatment has
improved man, then I will not contradict: I only add what
improve means for methe same as tamed, weakened,
discouraged, sophisticated, pampered, emasculated (hence
almost the same as injured)171
Stoic: I admire him for what he achieved but at times doesnt he become more than selfconfident. I occasionally feel that he saw himself as a prophet.
Sceptic: Well, it is obvious that he suffered from a certain megalomania. No doubt he
lacked self-critical eyes.

171

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and

Alan J. Swensen (Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), 103
260

Stoic: Does he give you the feeling that he regarded himself a prophet from time to time?
Could he have thought he was revealing the word of God?
Sceptic: The thinker talking through Zarathustras mouth has that prophetic quality.
Zarathustra is himself a prophet. There are various speculations concerning Nietzsches
entry into the realm of madness. When it occured and so on. Some say when his books
are read with a clinical intent there is no trace of madness in his work. I dont agree with
this. Already in Zarathustra there is a deterioration of his thought processes. An
exaggerated self-confidence appears in Ecce Homo. But to be considered a prophet is
what Nietzsche dreaded most. He says it in Ecce Homo: I have a terrible fear that one
day I will be pronounced holy.
Stoic: One still wonders whether he is the first prophet without a God, if he thought
himself to be the first prophet without a God, and with this thought he went off the rails?
Sceptic: Are you listening to what Im saying?
Stoic: He also sees himself as the disciple of Dionysus.
Sceptic: Have you heard what Ive just said?
Stoic: He signed Dionysus the last letter he wrote to Strindberg.
Sceptic: And Crucified at the same time. Nietzsches thought is full of paradoxes. Perhaps
thats one of the reasons why it is a philosophy for everyone. On any topic, on this or that
subject, there is this perspective and there is that. You can choose whatever works for you
and ignore the others. But thats not what Im really concerned with. The contradiction at
the heart of Nietzsche is that his theory of eternal return and the becoming of overman
cancel each other out. There are two distinct layers of time at which Nietzsches teaching
operates. First is the linear time of history, the time in which animals live, it is a
measurable time. Birth, reproduction, internalisation, metabolism, dissolution all take
261

place in this time; it is the time of life and death. The exact opposite of this time is the
circular time of the spirit. It is a time that transcends the linear time and the physical
world. It is a product of mans dissatisfaction with the physical world; a will to go beyond
the physical and/or outside time. He conceived of both of these forms of time (Aeon and
Chronos) and he existed in both at the same time. He was a man who knew that there is
nothing outside physical time and/but who still strived to go beyond this time.
Stoic: How agonizing is that? I think it is none other than himself he is talking about
when he says,
Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was
lacking, that an enormous void surrounded manhe did not know
how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself: he suffered from the
problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for
the most part a diseased animal: but the suffering itself was not his
problem, rather that the answer was missing to the scream of his
question: to what end suffering?172
All his life he tried to make sense of the inordinate measure of suffering and
privation he had to endure. In vain he looked for a way of exposing the vanity of all
human wishes. He was dissatisfied with his life and he hated himself for that. He kept
resisting the Stoic within himself. But his Sceptic side was incapable of putting
something other than the teachings of Socrates in the place left empty by the demolition
of his Stoic side. He equally resented having remained under the shadow of Socrates. To
escape from Socrates he attacked Platos metaphysics of presence and did this with the
tools he borrowed from Heraclitus; a pre-Stoic philosopher who has deeply influenced
172

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and

Alan J. Swensen (Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), 117
262

both the Zeno of Citium, who was the founder of Stoicism, and the Zeno of Elea, who
explained how it could be possible for a tortoise to pass Achilles in a race. If you look at
the latter Zenos paradox carefully you see that what he wants to say with all his arrow
business is that there can be no motion out of immobility. Yes, the arrow is at rest at every
instant and the mind unites those individual instants each a picture in itself. What the eye
receives is already what the minds synthesizing force creates. We see the arrow in
motion when in fact it is, at every instant of its existence, at rest. You see where Zeno is
coming from there. He is coming from Heraclitus idea that one cannot step into the
same river twice. The river which is stepped into is a different river at each instant of its
flow. You can see that Heraclitus is making a distinction between the flowing water and
the bed in which it flows. It is Heraclitus who first splits time. So Zeno finds himself in a
split time and can say that before rational thought unites time there is no movement to be
perceived.
Sceptic: But this means that Zeno thinks reason creates something out of nothing, or
movement out of immobility.
Stoic: And this is very similar to the foundational truth upon which Epictetus builds his
therapeutic philosophy. Epictetus says that we create our history, our past, present, and
future. It is up to us to change the way we perceive things, put them in a new light, see
ourselves differently, and act in way which would be in harmony with nature, in
accordance with reason, and for the benefit of all. Epictetus doesnt see the care of the
self as other than the care for the other, he reconciles the interior and the exterior of the
subject. So knowledge is a construct of the synthesis of the internal and the external; we
project what we have introjected. Between projection and introjection there is a synthetic
activity that unites the internal and the external, or the psychic and the material. And a
263

balance between the truth of whats really going on outside and how the subject perceives
this truth is a sign of health. An internally constituted external authority, the truth of
universal humanist rationalism, governs the subject in harmony with nature. Listen to
what nature says to you and you will know the right thing to do, truth is of nature, say the
Stoics. But Plato says: I, the truth, am speaking. How megalomaniac is that?
Sceptic: It is quite megalomaniac indeed. And that is the Platonic side of Nietzsche, an
exaggerated self-confidence.
Stoic: But with the thought of eternal return Nietzsche is shattered. He realizes how
random and chaotic life is and I think his thought of eternal return is a response to his
fragmentation at the time he was in Turin. The contingency of all things led him to
formulate the eternal return, a circular time with no beginning or an end. In this circular
time a throw of the dice will never abolish the chance, as Mallarm put it. So after the
nihilistic fantasies and Dionysian hallucinations are traversed the new age of bliss begins
for the ones who have learned to learn from what happens to them in this life and rather
than fall into the wound pass across it and affirm life as it is. Amor fati is both the driving
force and the outcome of the eternal return. Everyone is born free. One who loves ones
fate whatever happens is free. It is a very Stoic thought; as long as the mind is free who
cares about the body in chains. But this is not to despise the body, on the contrary, Stoics
do care about their bodies; cleanliness, appetite, health, good behaviour, humour,
kindness, affirmative attitude; it is a very naturalist social philosophy.
Sceptic: I didnt know that you were so off the rails. If I understood you correctly, in
eternal return there is no room for Darwinist linear evolution. Evolution is peculiar to
linear time. Nietzsche is after finding a new form of progressive movement in complicity
with the circular movement of time. The idea of eternal return is a very vague
264

formulation of what he was really after. It is Bergson who came closer to saying what
Nietzsche wanted to say. In his Creative Evolution Bergson investigates Zenos paradox
and comes to the conclusion that Zenos idea that there can be no movement in-itself
because time is infinitely divided within itself is not sufficient to theorize a practical and
creative evolutionary process other than a linear progress. Bergson says that cinema
achieves what Zeno thought was impossible. By creating motion pictures out of pictures
at rest at every instant he introduces mind as a projection-introjection mechanism just like
a camera. But while our consciousness thus introduces succession into external things,
inversely these things themselves externalise the successive moments of our inner
duration in relation to one another. 173 Bergson doesnt differ from Zeno as much as he
thinks he does, in that, it was Zeno who said mind projects what it had introjected. And
this projection-introjection mechanism is a binding-splitting force at the same time. It
binds the subject to the social as it splits the subject within itself, right?
Stoic: Well, almost. It is a matter of working through ways of dealing with history, with
the contingency of every event and the randomness of what happens to us in time. Stoics
look down on death and suffering. They say that which has happened cannot be changed
in linear time, but in circular time everything can be changed in perception and then
projected onto the present so as to leave behind the traumatic incident and move on
towards becoming present. So, you see, you are always already present and yet this
presence is always changing in relation to your past and future, and hence while you are
always present you are never present, you are always a non-presence becoming present.
So the way in which you relate to your past, the way in which you read your history,
determines your actions at present, so why dont you read your past in such a way as to
enable yourself to become self-present. It is about creating the self so as to create itself as
173

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, 228

265

a perpetually renewed self-presence. It is not out of nothing that something is created,

there never is nothing for the self. You can see that it is all very closely related to the
thought of death in Stoics. Let death and exile and everything that is terrible appear
before your eyes every day, especially death; and you will never have anything
contemptible in your thoughts or crave anything excessively. 174 It is one of his principal
doctrines always to start from sense-experience. Life is a process of breaking down and
remaking the sense of experience.
Sceptic: And after his intense sense-experiences Nietzsche dies, leaving behind words
that have long ago ceased to be his. Writing is a process of transforming the senseexperience to make it visible for the others. But at the same time writing is itself a senseexperience. And in Nietzsche we very occasionally see writing about the experience of
writing. There is an intense meditation on the affective quality of language in Nietzsche.
Sceptic: But he is partly blind to whats going on not only inside him but also outside
him.
Stoic: He gets too excited about the affect of language. And together with the will to
experience more of it he falls on the side of total dissolution. He pushes his thought to its
limit after which there is nothing, but he goes on and in utter dismemberment he finds
himself. But when he finds himself he is already dismembered and so finds that there is
no self outside the social. To find that out he had to push his thought to its limit and pay
the price with the loss of his mental health. Perhaps he was a bit too aggressive towards
the Stoics who could have shown him a way out of his dilemma: Remember that what is
insulting is not the person who abuses you or hits you, but the judgement about them that
they are insulting. So when someone irritates you be aware that what irritates you is your
174

Epictetus, The Encheiridion: The Handbook, trans. Nicholas P. White (Cambridge:

Hackett, 1983), 16
266

own belief. Most importantly, therefore, try not to be carried away by appearance, since if
you once gain time and delay you will control yourself more easily. 175 But Nietzsche was
busy with struggling with Stoics for their rationality and universality.
Sceptic: Well, Nietzsches aim has never been to write therapeutic prescriptions for the
ill. He sees this as taming. And yet this is what he is doing. With Nietzsche therapy and
critical theory confront each other. With priests everything simply becomes more
dangerous, not only curatives and healing arts, but also arrogance, revenge, acuity,
excess, love, lust to rule, virtue, disease; though with some fairness one could also add
that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly
form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul
acquire depth in a higher sense and become eviland these are, after all, the two basic
forms of the superiority of man over other creatures!176 Here he is talking about
Christianity and Buddhism, but you can imagine the same criticism directed against not
only Plato but also the Stoics. Nietzsches sees the Jews as the beginners of the slave
revolt in morality.177 You see, he is after an attitude to life that would be neither Jewish
nor Greek. And the common ground on which both the Greek and the Jewish civilizations
are built is an assumption that man is superior to other animals. It is not difficult to see
where he is coming from if you remember that Christians thought Jews to be as inferior
as animals. As for Buddhism, it is passive nihilism, a will to nothingness, for what is
Nirvana if not a mystical union with God, with nothingness. After dissolving all these
belief systems in a universal cesspool Nietzsche moves on to a revaluation of all values in
the light of the Genesis in The Old Testament: At the beginning was the word. But
what God is, for Nietzsche, is precisely this: nothingness. It doesnt start from
175

Epictetus, 16
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genalogy of Morality, 15-6
177
Nietzsche, 17
176

267

nothingness, it starts with language, and everything comes from language which has
neither a beginning nor an end.
Stoic: But I think you are missing Nietzsches point there. For there is a pre-linguistic
domain which is not nothingness, but something in between nothingness and everything
that there is, that space between is the realm of partial objects which serve the purpose of
relating to the world even before the language is acquired. And with this he comes back
to what Zeno was saying. At the beginning there is no-motion, but that state of the being
of things is not perceivable, for the mind unites partial-objects to form a sequence of
events, before which there is nothing perceivable. Zeno says, movement in-itself and for
itself is impossible because there can be no movement prior to the synthesis of the
individual states of being at rest. But with cinema we see that motionless pictures are put
one after the other in a particular sequence and when the film revolves a continuity of
images, a flow of pictures is created. There is the illusion of one continuous motion of
events when in fact each event is a motionless picture in itself.
Sceptic: But if it cannot be perceived how can you say that at the beginning there is
nothing and immobility?
Stoic: Well, thats not what Im saying. There is nothing at the beginning precisely
because nothing can be perceived before the beginning. You see, there is the absence of
something, there is nothing as the object of perception. You have to assume that
beginning itself has no beginning so that you can begin living, acting, and doing things.
Otherwise how can you live with the thought of being surrounded by nothingness and
death at all times? Death is where you cannot be. It is absolutely other to you, its
presence signifies your absence and inversely. Perhaps we should have said there is
nothing before the beginning and after the end. That fits in better with everything.
268

Sceptic: Yes, and with this sentence the riddle is solved to some extent; it is not a matter
of beginning or ending; everything is in the middle, and nothing is before the beginning
and after the end. The eternal return has neither a beginning nor an end.
Stoic: Even when you die your body is still in the process of dissolving; you dissolve into
other things and become something else. It is not resurrection Im talking about here. Nor
is resurrection what Nietzsche attempted to theorize with the thought of eternal return,
but a very materialist understanding of nature and its relation to man. Nietzsche never
says what exactly the eternal return means but from what he says we come to a grasp of
what it might mean. Let me quote Nietzsche at length. In this one of the best descriptions
of what the eternal return might mean we see Zarathustra talking with a dwarf about time,
the moment as a gateway to possibilities, and the passage of time.
Everything straight lies, murmured the dwarf disdainfully.
All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.
Spirit of Gravity! I said angrily, do not treat this too lightly!
Or I shall leave you squatting where you are, Lamefootand I
have carried you high!
Behold this moment! I went on. From this gateway Moment
a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind us.
Must not all things that can run have already run along this
lane? Must not all things that can happen have already
happened, been done, run past?
And if all things have been here before: what do you think of
this moment, dwarf? Must not this gateway, too, have been
herebefore?
269

And are not all things bound fast together in such a way that
this moment draws after it all future things? Thereforedraws
itself too?
For all things that can run must also run once again forward
along this long lane.
And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and
this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering
together, whispering of eternal thingsmust we not all have
been here before?
and must we not return and run down that other lane out
before us, down that long, terrible lanemust we not return
eternally?178
You see, what renders the eternal return possible is saying yes to difference in repetition.
The eternal return is Nietzsches grand conception which excludes all binary opposition
and defies the binary logic of being and non-being. You can see that it is far away from
what Diogenes Laertius was saying concerning the relationship between absence and
presence. For Laertius where there is absence there can be no presence and inversely. But
Nietzsche thinks that being and non-being, presence and absence are intermingled, are the
two constitutive parts of becoming. One side of becoming accomplishes its movement
while the other fails to accomplish its movement. So the persistence of being can only
take the form of becoming. It is the becoming of being that counts as the immaculate
conception of the eternal return. The eternal return is not a metaphysical concept, rather it
renders possible attachment to the material world, the world as it is before turning into a
fable in and through a linear narrative of history. The eternal return is a tool for
178

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 178-9

270

interpreting the world in its infinity and finitude at the same time, and its legacy lies in its
rejection of both a purely transcendental and a purely immanent interpretation of the
world. When Nietzsche makes the dwarf say everything straight lies[] all truth is
crooked, time itself is a circle, he is pointing towards an ethical imperative, namely, that
one must give free rein to the unconscious drives so that in time, as these drives are let to
manifest themselves in and through language, it becomes apparent that it is ridiculous to
repress them for it is repression itself that produces them; so the more one represses them
the more one contributes to their strengthening. As you see what at stake here is a way of
governing the self in relation to others. Eternal return is will to power and will to
nothingness at the same time, it is the name of the process of becoming through which
the subject becomes other than itself. This becoming other than itself of the subject is in
the form of an emergence of the new out of the old, that is, realization of an already
existing possibility and will towards its actualisation through this realization. So the
subject assumes what it was in the past and upon this assumption builds its present as
already past and yet to come. It is in this context that Foucault says genealogy is a
history of the present.
Sceptic: Very interesting. You seem to have figured out the ways of passing across the
avenues Gilles Deleuze opened in the way of explicating the meaning of eternal return
and its use. Look at what he says in a passage, perhaps the most lucid articulation of
Deleuzes conception of time and its passage in Nietzsche and Philosophy:
What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither
starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which
becomes. That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a
world of becoming to world of beinghigh point of the
271

meditation. [Will to Power, 617] This problem for the meditation

must be formulated in yet another way; how can the past be
constituted in time? How can the present pass? The passing
moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to
comeat the same time as being present. If the present did not
pass of its own accord, if it had to wait for a new present in order
to become past, the past in general would never be constituted in
time, and this particular present would not pass. We cannot wait,
the moment must be simultaneously present and past, present and
yet to come, in order for it to pass (and to pass for the sake of other
moments). The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to
come. The synthetic relation of the moment to itself as present,
past and future grounds its relation to other moments. The eternal
return is thus an answer to the problem of passage. And in this
sense it must not be interpreted as the return of something that is,
that is one or the same. We misinterpret the expression
eternal return if we understand is as return of the same.179
Stoic: It is true. Let me explain. With the big-bang a substance of infinite intensity begins
its still ongoing process of expansion-contraction. And this process must always already
be complete for it to even begin taking its course of becoming; everything happens at
present and for that reason there is neither a beginning nor an end of time. The force
combinations are infinitely repeated but because of its previous repetition the quality of
the forces themselves change and give birth to its becoming different from itself through
repetition of what it assumes itself to be in relation to time. So the subject always already
179

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 48

272

is what it strives to become and yet the only way to actualise this becoming what one is is
this: one has to realize that what one is striving to become is already what one is. All the
configurations have to repeat themselves eternally for the return of the same to take
place. But when this same returns one sees that it has never been the same but always
already different from itself. When the future comes it becomes present, the subject is
always at present and can never know what it would be like to exist in another present.
There is nothing and the present.
Sceptic: Eternal return is the first conceptualisation of the death drive. It is not death
drive but it operates the way death-drive operates, and since none of these have any
existence outside their operations they are the two different forms the same content takes.
The subject of the eternal return wills nothingness and this willing nothingness always
returns as a will to power. You can see that Nietzsche uses this grand conception of the
relationship between creation and destruction to invert destructive and reactive Nihilism
into the spotlight; he turns Nihilism against itself through the thought of eternal return as
the thought of becoming other than what one thinks one is. What was repressed and
locked into the unconscious once turns into its opposite and becomes the order of the day
in a new light and in another time. In this light time is itself the fourth dimension of
space. That is how Nietzsche can see the rise of Nihilism in its material, historical
conditions. We all come and keep coming from inorganic substance and will end up there.
Nietzsches confrontation with truth was the confrontation of brain with chaos. And out
of this confrontation emerges the truth of the death drive, the will to nothingness
disguised as the will to truth, the internally constituted external governor of a Nihilistic
Europe.

273

Stoic: Yes. They are in our midst and yet exterior to us. We are surrounded and governed
by nothingness and death which have neither a beginning nor an end. Well, at least not for
us, who are those governed by them. For when we die we are nowhere to see our dead
bodies or experience death as our own. Death occurs where there is the absence of my
selfs sense-experience, all the rest is a process of being towards death, dying, becomingdead. When death finally arrives even my name ceases to be mine, or rather, it is realized
that even my name has never been mine. There remains no one to carry out my life in my
name once death is here.
Sceptic: Death and nothingness are interior and exterior to us at the same time. Most of
us, however, keep the thought of death at bay at all times; those of us are the ones who
live their lives without thinking about death, for they think, in a Spinozan fashion, that
he who is free thinks of nothing less than of death and his meditation is a wisdom not of
death but of life. This is the time of good-sense where everything is identical and
everything can be substituted by something else.
Stoic: The will to power and the will to nothingness reverse the roles. We break down as
we go along the way towards the completion of passing across the field of partial objects.
Sceptic: Precisely. You told me what I was trying to tell you. And what is thought worth
if it is not in the service of the present? Sacrificing the present by scarfacing yourself for
the sake of a better future face is itself the worst thing that can be done to your face at all
times. In vain is he/she who strives for immortality.
Stoic: Let us move on to the subjects of finitude and infinity, then. Here is a question for
you: Are we finite becomings or infinite beings?
Sceptic: We might as well be neither or both of these. Its a matter of taste depending on
whether you see being alive as a process of dying or a process of living.
274

Stoic: I think we who are alive, or at least think we are, are infinite beings by nature, but
turn into finite becomings in and through our cultures. I say we are infinite beings
because infinity has no beginning or end, so its impossible for an infinite entity to be a
becoming, only a being can be infinite, whereas a finite entity has a beginning from
which its becoming starts taking its course and comes to a halt at the end. Since the
concept of time is a cultural construct imposed on nature by human beings, because we
see other people die, we have come to imagine that we are limited by finitude and
surrounded by infinity, when in fact it is the other way around; that is, we are infinite
beings and death constitutes an internal limit to our being in the world, giving birth to our
idea of ourselves as finite becomings. Do you understand?
Sceptic: Yes I do. We dont have to strive for immortality, for we are always already
immortals who are incapable of realising their immortalities.
Stoic: Shall we leave it at that, then?
Sceptic: Lets do so.
Stoic: No last words?
Sceptic: None at all.
Stoic: No worst of all words.
Sceptic: None worse than last words.
Stoic: Well then, the end to which we are all devoted shall be to raise our glasses to this
worsening suffering!
Sceptic: To what end last words?
Stoic: To what end suffering?
Stoic and Sceptic: Oh, dear!

275

Filmography
Cronenberg, David (dir.) The Dead Zone (Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, 1983)
--- Dead Ringers (The Mantle Clinic II Ltd, 1988)
---Videodrome (Guardian Trust Company, 1982)
---eXistenZ (Screenventures and Alliance Atlantis, 1999)
---Naked Lunch (Optimum Releasing, 2004)
Bress, Eric and Mackye, Gruber (dirs.) The Butterfly Effect (PRA Film, 2004)
Lynch, David (dir.) Mulholland Drive (Universal Studios, 2002)
Solomon, Ed (dir.) Levity (Studio Canal, 2002)

Bibliography
Abel, Linel. Metatheatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998)
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972)

276

Althusser, Louis. The Ideological State Apparatuses, from Mapping Ideology, ed.
Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1994)
Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California,
1975)
Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 2000)
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(London: Verso, 2001)
Badiou, Alain. Dissymetries: On Beckett, eds. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power
(Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003)
Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought, trans. and eds. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens
(London: Continuum, 2005)
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005)
Badiou, Alain. Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, (London:
Continuum, 2006)
Bass, Alan. The Trauma of Eros (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder and
Boyars, 1973)
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess, ed. trans. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1985)

277

Beard, William. The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (London:
University of Toronto Press, 2001)
Beckett, Samuel. Texts For Nothing, (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975)
Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990)
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow:
Fontana Press, 1973)
Bion, Wilfred. Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,
1967)
Bion, Wifred. Learning From Experience (London: Karnac, 1962)
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of The Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London:
The University of Nebraska Press, 1995)
Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1993)
Breton, Andr. What is Surrealism? ed. and trans. Franklin Rosemont ( London: Pluto
Press, 1978)
Burgoyne, Bernard and Sullivan, Marry (eds.) The Klein-Lacan Dialogues (London:
Rebus Press, 1997)
Burroughs, William. Nova Express (London: Panther, 1982)
Burroughs, William. Queer (New York: Penguin, 1985)
Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch (London: Flamingo, 1993)
278

Burroughs, William. Letters (New York: Penguin, 1994)

Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)
Butler, Judith. Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
Butler, Rex. Slavoj Zizek: live theory (London: Continuum, 2005)
Caillois, Roger. A Caillois Reader: The Edge of Surrealism, ed. Caludine Frank, trans.
Claudine Frank and Camille Naish (London: Duke University Press, 2003)
Cook, Jon. (ed.) Poetry in Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
Copjec, Joan Karen. Apparatus and Umbra: A Feminist Critique of Film Theory
(Michigan: Dissertation Information Service, Microfilms International, 1986)
Copjec, Joan. (ed.) Radical Evil (London: Verso, 1996)
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
II, transl. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988)
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, transl.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: The Viking Press, 1977)
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy, transl. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum,
1983)
Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: A life, transl, Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books,
2001)
Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty: Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1989)

279

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault, transl. Sean Hand (London: Athlone, 1999)

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense, transl. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990)
Deleuze, Gilles. Essays: Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A.
Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998)
Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, transl. Michale
Taormina (Semiotext(e): New York, 2004)
Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-Image (London: Athlone Press, 1989)
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002)
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994)
Descartes, Ren. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes vol. II, eds. and trans.
Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Hutchinson,
1980)
Edelman, Gerald. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New
York: Basic Books, 2000)
Einstein, Albert. Einstein on Peace, ed. Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden (New York:
Schocken Books, 1960)
Elliot, Anthony and Frosh, Stephen (eds.) Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths Between
Theory and Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1995)
Elliot, Jurist. Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture, and Agency
(Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000)
280

Epictetus. The Encheiridion: The Handbook, trans. Nicholas P. White (Cambridge:

Hackett, 1983)
Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999)
Field, Nathan. Breakdown and Breakthrough: Psychoanalysis in a new dimension
(London: Routledge, 1996)
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization, transl. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock
Publications, 1965)
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1977)
Foucault,

Michel.

The

Archaeology

of

Knowledge,

transl.

A.

Sheridan

(London:Routledge, 1972)
Foucault, Michel. The Will To Knowledge: History of Sexuality vol. 1, transl. Robert
Hurley (Middlesex: Penguin, 1998)
Foucault, Michel. The Care of The Self: History of Sexuality vol. 3, transl. Robert Hurley
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1990)
Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, transl. Robert
Hurley and Others (London: Penguin, 1997)
Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics: Essential Works of Foucault 2, ed. James Faubion, transl.
Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin, 1998)

281

Foucault, Michel. Power: Essential Works of Foucault 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans.
Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin, 2000),
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works, trans. ed. James
Strachey (London: Penguin, 1985)
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon
Books, 1965)
Freud, Sigmund. On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards
(London: Penguin, 1984)
Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, ed.
Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1976)
Freud, Sigmund. Leonardo da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood, trans. Strachey J.
(London: Hogarth Press, 1964)
Freud, Sigmund. Psycho-analytic Notes On An Autobiogrophical Account Of A Case Of
Paranoia (Dementia Paranoids), trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth Press, 1986)
Freud, Sigmund. On Narcissism: An Introduction, trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth
Press, 1964)
Freud, Sigmund. Instincts And Their Vicissitudes, trans. Strachey J. (London: Hogarth
Press, 1964)
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality, trans. Strachey J. (London:
Hogarth Press, 1964)
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies (Faber and Faber: Boston, 1954)
Grant, Michael (ed.) The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg
(Connecticut: Praeger, 2000)

282

Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life, transl. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995)
Hallward, Peter. Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London:
Verso, 2006)
Hamilton, Victoria. Narcissus and Oedipus: The Children of Psychoanalysis (London:
Routledge, 1982)
Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1977)
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)
Hobbes,Thomas. Leviathan, in Law and Morality: Readings in Legal Philosophy, eds.
David Dyzenhous and Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1996)
Holland, Eugene W. Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to
Schizoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999)
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (New York: Wilder
Publications, 2008)
Kerouac, Jack. The Subterraneans (London: Penguin, 2001)
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, 1957)
King, Stephen. The Dead Zone (London: TimeWarner, 1979)
Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, (London: The Hogarth
Press, 1984)

283

Klein, Melanie. The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975)
Klein, Melanie. Our adult world and other essays (London: Heinemann, 1975)
Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and The Vicious Cycle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London:
Athlone, 1997)
Kristeva, Julia. Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001)
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of
Love and Knowledge (New York: Norton, 1998)
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977)
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press and
the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977)
Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlam (Baltimore and
London: John Hopkins, 1976)
Lawson, Hilary. Reflexivity: The post-modern predicament (London: Hutchinson, 1985)
Lebeau, Vicky. Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2001)
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, non-sense,
desire (London: Hutchinson,1985)
Lorraine, Tamsin. Living a Time Out of Joint, from Between Deleuze and Derrida, eds.
Paul Patton and John Protevi (London and NY: Continuum, 2003)
284

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in Advanced Industrial Society

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964)
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On The Genealogy of Morality, transl. Maudemarie Clark and Alan
J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998)
O Pray, Michael. Film, Form, and Phantasy: Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics (New
York: Palgrave, 2004)
Phillips, Adam. Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (London:
Faber and Faber, 2000)
Pope, Rob. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice (London: Routledge, 2005)
Poster, Mark. Foucault, Marxism and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984)
Riley, Denise. The Words of Selves (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
Riley, Denise. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2005)
Sanchez-Pardo, Esther. Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist
Melencholia (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2003
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (London: Penguin, 1996)
Thomas, D.M. The White Hotel (Bury St Edmunds: St Edmundsbury Press, 1981)
Weinreich, Ragina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987)

285

William, Golding. Lord of The Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1975)
Winnicott, Donald. Playing and Reality, (London: Tavistock, 1971)
iek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997)
iek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999)
iek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000)
iek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? ( London: Verso, 2001)
iek, Slavoj. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York and
London: Routledge, 2004)
iek, Slavoj. The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)
Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of The Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000)

286